Lead Generation for B2B Businesses: A Practical Guide for Sales and Marketing

Every business, at the end of the day, cares mainly about two things — generating leads and converting those leads to paying customers. But with rising competition and the increasing number of touchpoints/interactions required before a prospect can even be considered a warm lead that your sales team can reach out to, a lot of businesses are struggling to generate as many leads as they would like to.?

On the other hand, there are many businesses in Bangladesh in the tech or B2B space more generally who rely primarily on a random mix of word-of-mouth, some top-of-funnel content and social media marketing, and a few other things for lead generation. However, they remain unable to strategically and consistently generate leads in rising numbers.?

This piece is intended to shine a light on effective lead generation techniques that can help businesses formulate a solid strategy to generate a growing number of leads consistently. I explain the different categories of leads, best lead generation techniques, and the metrics you should track to understand whether your initiatives are bearing fruit or not.?

Different Types of Leads

In order to understand and deploy lead generation techniques, it’s important to understand what the term ‘lead’ means within your business context. At what point does a potential customer become eligible to be considered a lead??

Primarily, for most B2B businesses, there are three types of leads:?

Information Qualified Leads (IQLs)

IQLs are what you can call cold leads. They may be aware of your company and solution, perhaps through exposure to your web and/or social media content. They might even have given you their email and allowed you to email them to download some gated content. However, they have not yet expressed any interest in learning more about your solution. Thinking from a marketing funnel perspective, they are at the top of the funnel, i.e., at the awareness stage.?

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

MQLs are those leads that are in the consideration stage of the marketing funnel. They are warm leads that have repeatedly interacted with your brand online and seem to demonstrate a strong interest in learning deeply about your solution. For instance, they may have downloaded a white paper, attended a few webinars, or even booked a demo meeting with one of your reps.?

In fact, in a lot of companies, a lead is only designated as an MQL once they have booked and attended a demo call and expressed an interest in proceeding further. That is when the lead enters the sales funnel and is transferred to the sales team.?

Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)

Once a lead is designated as an MQL, they are typically handed over to the sales team for further conversations. After one or more conversations, if the sales team comes to the conclusion that the lead is a serious opportunity that is worth pursuing, then the lead comes to be known as a sales-qualified lead or SQL.?

In other words, an SQL is a lead who is past the consideration stage in the buyer journey and is in the decision-making stage. Another way of defining an SQL would be to think in terms of intent to purchase. An SQL is a lead that demonstrates a strong intent to buy.?

Most Effective Lead Generation Strategies

Generating leads is not as easy as it used to be even a couple of years ago and it is certain to get a lot more difficult in the future. Therefore, it is necessary to take a full-funnel approach based on a solid understanding of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).?

Here are five effective lead generation strategies that will address the needs of your target audience at every stage of the buyer journey, streamline their journey across the entire marketing/sales funnel, and help you close more deals.?

Content Marketing to Establish Awareness and Authority

In order to generate leads, you must first ensure that people who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) discover your company, product, or service. The best way to do this is through content marketing. From blog posts to shorts and reels, you need to produce high-quality topical content that your target audience is likely to be in search of.?

What sort of content you produce, for which channels, and on which topics are all questions that you need to figure out based on a thorough understanding of your ICP. Consider which channels they are most active in (for a lot of B2B companies, this is likely to be LinkedIn and search) and what sort of content they might wish to see at every stage of the buyer journey.?

To find out what sort of content your target audience might be looking for, you can gather data using SEO tools and social listening and monitoring tools. However, you might find that the landscape is a bit crowded. There is so much content out there, a lot of which might be very good and relevant content put out by your competitors.?

To stand out from the competition, try to find topics that your target audience is struggling to find good quality information on from your competitors and produce high-quality content covering those topics and questions.?

Develop High-Quality Lead Magnets

As noted in the previous point, if you want leads, you need to have content that attracts leads. But not just any content. You need to have content good enough for people to willingly provide their email addresses to download and/or read.?

While free-to-read blog posts and other free-to-consume content might help create awareness and demand at the top of the funnel, thereby helping the lead gen process, you do need gated content to get people to provide their email addresses so that you can nurture them as leads. Therefore, you must invest in producing reports, white papers, and other types of well-researched, original, and authoritative content that would be attractive enough for your target audience to provide their email addresses voluntarily.?

Webinars can also be a good way to get people to give you their information. But you need to ensure the webinars are relevant, interesting, and involve experts covering topics that the typical person fitting your ICP would love to know more about.?

Social Media Marketing to Promote Content and Lead Magnets

Having great content and lead magnets may not be of much use if you are not able to get them in front of your target audience. You need to ensure that your content and lead magnets reach them through all methods that make sense.?

One method that makes sense for almost all businesses is social media. But there are many social media channels and you should not try to excel in all of them. Different platforms require different kinds of content for organic growth. You may not be able to create so much content and neither should you attempt to. Just pick the platforms where people fitting your ICP are most concentrated and try to maximize organic reach there.?

However, with organic reach declining, especially across platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and the recent updates to Google’s algorithm resulting in a significant dip in traffic for many sites, you may find the results you are looking for elusive if you only rely on organic growth. You might need to opt for paid marketing, also known as performance marketing, especially to promote your most valuable content and lead magnets.?

For most B2B businesses, Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads are likely to have the best ROI for paid marketing. But Meta Ads may also be relevant if a lot of your target audience is active and easy to target on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.?

Email Marketing and Cold Outreach

You might have heard the death of cold outreach being pronounced on several occasions by many knowledgeable and well-meaning people. However, if you are a B2B business owner or marketer, the best way to reach your target audience is still through direct contact via email or phone.?

While not dead, cold email marketing is more competitive than ever. As a result, you need to ensure that your email lists are properly segmented and your email copy is as personalized as possible. You would not want to send the same message to a prospect who has only ever downloaded one white paper from your website and one who has interacted with you across multiple touch points and has demonstrated a much stronger intent in buying or at least learning about your solution.?

Cold calling might be a bit tricker than email, but this is also something you should pay serious attention to. If done right, it can yield great results. For instance, you might want to only call leads who have reached/exceeded a certain lead score or those who have opened your emails and entered your calendar link but have not ended up booking a meeting.?

Personalized Landing Pages for Lead Capture and Engagement

If you want to generate leads quickly, chances are, you have to resort to at least some amount of paid marketing. Through paid marketing, you can target people who fit your ICP and direct them to discover your solution, download your content, visit landing pages, and book meetings with you, among other things. However, here, as in email marketing, you need to ensure that you segment your audience properly and launch targeted ad campaigns.?

You need to ensure that the landing page or the content that you are pushing out to your audience is likely to be relevant to them. For instance, in my piece on account-based marketing, I highlighted the case of DocuSign, which used personalized landing pages to increase click-through rates, engagement, and pipeline growth.?

They realized that directing everyone to the same landing page was not working. Therefore, they segmented their audience into different groups and created personalized landing pages for each group. This is something that you should also consider to get the maximum ROI from your paid marketing.?

How to Measure and Track Lead Generation Efforts?

Across all your marketing platforms and tools, there is likely to be an enormous multitude of metrics to measure and track your marketing efforts. In the midst of so many metrics, it’s easy to get lost and have your focus diverted away from the key metrics that you should be religiously monitoring.

Conversion Rate

This is a bit of a no-brainer, but I must add this to a list of metrics to track to measure the success of your lead generation efforts. Ultimately, what you care about is the number of people who end up buying from you. Otherwise, no matter how good your other metrics make your sales and marketing look, it’s not helping your business grow.?

Therefore, the first metric that you must track is the conversion rate — the percentage of people who go from being a prospect/lead to a paying customer. While tracking the conversion rate, ensure that you track the channel(s) responsible for the conversion. This may be easier said than done, but do your best to attribute the conversion to the most appropriate channel(s) to figure out what’s working and what’s not.

Cost Per Lead (CPL)

If you want to understand the performance of your lead generation efforts, you need to know how much money you need to spend to generate a single lead. You can find this by dividing your total marketing and advertising spend by the number of leads you generate. The lower the cost per lead, the better the performance of your lead gen efforts.?

Mind you, there is no universal benchmark for how high/low your cost per lead should be. Try to find out the average in your industry and benchmark your results against that. But this too may be misleading in many cases, such as, if you are a new entrant in a highly competitive zone.?

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

While the CPL measures the cost of generating leads, your customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures your cost of acquiring customers. Now, the question is, do you need to measure and track both? Ideally, yes.?

Since not all of your leads will convert to being customers, tracking both CPL and CAC will give you greater insights into your sales and marketing performance. More specifically, your CAC will help you understand the cost of turning your leads into customers.?

You can calculate your CAC by dividing the total amount of money you spend on marketing, advertising, and sales by the number of new customers generated. For benchmarking, you can compare your CAC against those of companies who are in the same industry, and sell a similar product that is also priced similarly. If you have a high average ticket size, your CAC will reflect that.?

Sales Velocity

For a lot of B2B businesses, the sale cycle is complex and long. Therefore, one of the best ways you can track how well your sales and marketing teams are doing in generating, nurturing, and converting leads is by tracking the sales velocity.?

Sales velocity is basically the speed with which your business can take a lead through the buyer journey and convert them into a customer. The higher the sales velocity, the greater the revenue growth you can achieve. While not the easiest to measure, this metric can help uncover and resolve bottlenecks in your sales and marketing processes.?

You can calculate sales velocity using the formula below:?

Sales velocity = (Number of opportunities x Average deal value x Win rate) / Sales cycle length

Lead Churn Rate

Churn rate is one of the key metrics to measure customer success and retention. But it is also a great metric to track when measuring your lead gen efforts. By measuring this, you can get some granular data about strategies, techniques, and channels that are working versus those that are not working as effectively.?

Lead churn rate is basically the percentage of leads who drop out of the pipeline/funnel before conversion. If you notice a high rate of churn among your leads, you need to figure out at which point and across which campaigns and channels this churn is happening.?

Once you are able to identify the campaigns, messaging, and channels that are not working, you can try refining them or abandoning them altogether and diverting those resources to initiatives that are working.?

MQL to SQL Conversion Rate

If you find that your sales velocity or conversion rate are not where they should be and want to zero in on the bottlenecks in your processes, then there are two metrics that you can turn to — MQL to SQL conversion rate and SQL to Win conversion rate.?

The first one — MQL to SQL conversion rate — is, as the name suggests, the percentage of leads who travel the distance between being an MQL to being an SQL.?

While an MQL may not end up becoming an SQL for any number of reasons unrelated to your organization, in some cases, bottlenecks within your organization may be responsible. In that case, you need to be able to identify and rectify it. Monitoring the MQL and SQL conversion rate can alert you to such bottlenecks.?

SQL to Win Conversion Rate

The second metric that can help you uncover bottlenecks in your internal processes is the SQL to Win conversion rate. Simply put, this is the percentage of SQLs that you are able to successfully convert into paying customers.?

Again, an SQL may not be converting to a customer for reasons unrelated to your organization. However, this can often be a result of gaps in your sales efforts and processes.?

Therefore, by measuring and monitoring your SQL to Win conversion rate, you can find those gaps and address them promptly to ease the way for higher conversions.?

Lead Generation vs. Demand Generation

Among marketers, you will today find constant talk of the need to combine lead generation with demand generation for the best chance of success. But what does this term, ‘demand generation,’ mean??

Demand generation is an approach whereby you focus on educating your target audience and creating demand for your solution among them. In other words, demand generation encompasses all those top-of-funnel activities that bring your target audience in contact with your brand and generate interest in your solution among them.?

On the other hand, lead generation refers to those initiatives and campaigns that are targeted to leads at the bottom of the funnel in order to convert them into customers. Initiatives like cold email marketing and cold calling, for instance, will fall into this category.?

At one point, marketers and business leaders used the term lead generation to refer to both lead generation and demand generation. However, very quickly, organizations started leaning too heavily on bottom-of-funnel initiatives because the ROI of these initiatives is easier to measure and see.?

Initially, this bore results. But as B2B sales and marketing became more competitive, organizations started to realize the importance of demand generation and how lead gen efforts can be hamstrung unless backed by solid demand gen efforts. Therefore, you must strike a balance between the two. Even if you choose to divert more resources to lead gen since you can get quicker results, you must not neglect demand gen completely.?

• Originally published on my blog.