When you approach a new financial quarter, it’s the time for review and reflection. This is particularly true for Q4, where you may be working extra hard if you’ve fallen slightly short of hitting your sales targets, reflecting on what worked well over the last year, and what can be improved for the following year. Ultimately answering the overarching; ‘Have we met our growth goals this year?’
Lead generation for the B2B sphere has not been easy, especially with the uncertainty of the economic climate, the emergence of new buzz words such as quiet quitting, and the hangover from the great resignation. If your business has fallen short of smashing your targets this year, there’s plenty of other tactics you can apply to your marketing strategy to drive exponential growth.
The Lead Gen Specialists are going to share with you 3 steps you can apply to your marketing strategy to drive exponential growth.
By using an omni-channel approach to your lead generation strategy, you can expect to see an increase in the number of leads, but also an improvement in the quality of your leads.
Harnessing The Power of Telemarketing
Due to the sheer amount of lead generation tactics available on the market, telemarketing can be often overlooked when deciding on your marketing strategy for the year ahead. Despite misconceptions surrounding telemarketing, it can generate an impressive ROI when compared to other methods. In fact, B2B businesses can generate as much as £11 for every £1 spent on their telemarketing activity (DMA).
But, how do you harness the power of telemarketing when generating leads?
As a business owner, you will already have an idea of your ideal customer profile (ICP). This is a fantastic place to start. Before embarking on your telemarketing journey, ensure you are clear on the type of industries, company size, and the job titles of the people who are in a position of power within the decision making process.
If you’re ahead of the game, you may already have an existing contact list, however if you don’t, not to worry! You can source high-quality B2B data from reputable providers, or you can create your own by undertaking research on companies and their decision makers.
Creating Your Value Proposition
You’ve established your ICP and have collated your database, now it’s time to work on your messaging. When looking to engage with prospects via telemarketing, you need to be able to wrap the benefits of your proposition in a compact, value filled dialogue that instantly resonates with your prospects, allowing you to have a detailed, commercial conversation. This is a statement or idea that describes the benefits that your company or product offers. By having an existing understanding of your ICP, you will be aware of the pain points that your prospects face. Your value proposition should solve those pain points and answer the question, ‘why should the customer buy our product or service?’
As a business, no one knows your product better than you. You will undoubtedly have a clear, defined list of the features of your product. Unfortunately, prospects aren’t interested in the features of your product, they want to know, ‘what’s in it for me?’
How to Turn Features into Benefits
Features are facts about your product or service, for example ‘Our bleach kills 99.9% of bacteria.’
A benefit is what gives your customers an incentive to buy because it explains how your product will improve your prospects’ work life, business and growth. Using the aforementioned example, the benefit could be ‘Spend less time cleaning with our new and improved formula. Our formula eliminates 99.9% of bacteria, allowing you to spend less time cleaning and more time relaxing.’
If you’re still thinking about how you can apply this to your own product or service, ask yourself the question; ‘So, what?’
Let’s use another example; say you are an end-to-end manufacturing business that takes care of the whole process from design to delivery.
So, what?
Well, that means that your customers can feel at ease knowing they don’t have to chase multiple vendors for updates. It also means your lead times are shorter and the quality of your product is more consistent.
It’s imperative to know the benefits of your product or service when creating your value proposition as you are directly telling your customers exactly how your business is going to solve their problems.
Implementing Telemarketing
You’ve got your database, you’ve got your value proposition, now it’s time to implement telemarketing into your marketing strategy. There are two ways you can go about this; hire an in-house team and train them on the intricacy of your product, or outsource to a team of experienced telemarketers.
Both options have their own benefits.
In-House Telemarketing
With an in-house team, you have direct control and oversight over your telemarketing efforts. You can closely manage the team’s activities, monitor their performance, and make real-time adjustments to your strategy as needed.
If you do not have an existing telemarketing team in-house, you have got to consider the associated costs and responsibilities involved. Recruiting and training an in-house team can be resource intensive and wearying.
You also have to factor in what happens if certain telemarketers cannot generate the amount of leads you would like. Ultimately going through the rigmarole of offboarding one employee and onboarding another. Not to mention other considerations such as payroll, pensions, bonuses, data management and objection handling. You may also have to wait a little longer to start generating leads when compared to outsourcing as your in-house team may not have the experience needed to start hitting the ground running.
Outsourced Telemarketing
Outsourcing can often be the most cost-effective way of conducting professional telemarketing activity. By utilising the skillsets of a professional telemarketing agency, you can not only benefit from not having to train, mentor and manage your telemarketing team, but also truly hit the ground running with professionals that know how to have peer-to-peer conversations, generate sales qualified opportunities, and have benefit packed dialogue.
If you choose to outsource your telemarketing efforts to a lead generation agency, ensure that you conduct thorough research. Look at the services they provide, perhaps look for case studies to get an idea of the number of results they can potentially yield for your business.
Appointment Setting
In a nutshell, appointment setting is the process of transforming prospects into interested buyers. This begins with a process similar to the above; identifying a potential prospect list and making an initial contact with that key decision maker. The goal of this initial contact is to determine their interest in your product or service.
Did you know that 61% of B2B marketers send all of their leads to sales. However, only 27% of these leads are actually qualified?
Having a strong lead qualification process is imperative at an early stage of the lead generation journey to ensure success. At The Lead Gen Specialists, we use the advanced qualification framework, FAINT, to help us identify what leads are genuine. A FAINT qualified lead stands for:
F – Funds
Do they have the budget for your product or service?
A – Authority
Does this decision maker have purchasing power within their business?
I – Interest
Do they have an interest in your product or service?
N – Need
What is their need for your solution?
T – Timing
Establish purchase intent and a specific timeframe for doing so.
By qualifying leads against this framework, your sales team can be confident that they are meeting with a serious buyer.
Establishing a Call to Action
Before you begin calling prospective buyers, you need to be certain on the call to action (CTA). Having a clear, established CTA is important for both your lead generation team and your prospects.
But, why is this?
When contacting prospects, regardless of what stage they are at in the buyer’s journey, you need to make it clear what the next steps of the sales process is.
A clear and concise CTA is not just beneficial for your business, but by sharing the next steps with the prospect, they can then feel secure and build trust with your brand.
Cold Email Outreach
Cold email outreach is a strategic marketing approach that offers a multitude of benefits to businesses. Through well-crafted, personalised emails, it enables your company to engage directly with your prospective customers, fostering brand awareness and building trust.
Best Practices for Cold Email Outreach
Short and Sweet
As a general rule of thumb, you should attempt to keep the length of your emails short and sweet. Aim for between 100-150 words. Decision makers are busy, with emails flying in and out of their inbox all day. Your email needs to get straight to the point, appeal to their pain points, offer your business as a viable solution and contain a concise CTA.
Make it Personal
Personalisation is not as simple as ‘Hi Firstname’. You need to conduct research into the types of people you’re going to be emailing. Who are they? What industry do they work in? How do they see the world? And most of all ‘What do they want?’ Once you have understood this process, you can then work on tailoring your messaging to tell a story that is going to resonate with them.
Giving Your Audience What They Want
When you begin writing the copy for your email, you need to ask yourself the question; why should they care about my email?
If you are aware of a blinding pain point that your product solves, highlight this to your prospect and offer them some relief. Your email outreach needs to be centered around your prospect and what your business can do for them.
Invest in a CRM
CRM systems enables your business to organise, track, and nurture leads efficiently, ensuring that no prospect is overlooked. Not only that, but using a CRM system enables you to segment different audiences and send out specific tailored messaging that will resonate with various members of your target audience.
CRM systems empowers your business with valuable insights into your customer’s behaviour. Inevitably, helping you to refine your outreach strategies and conversion rates.
By incorporating the above three lead generation tactics into your 2024 marketing strategy, you can be rest assured that your business will undoubtedly meet, if not exceed your growth goals. If you’ve read this article and are worried about where you will find the people power to execute your strategy, outsourcing your lead generation to an agency will provide you with the results you’re looking for, without straining your existing resources.
If you would like to start engaging with senior decision makers and would like to find out more information, please get in touch with The Lead Gen Specialists today by calling 03332 400 054 or emailing enquiries@leadgenspecialists.co.uk to find out how our telemarketing services can skyrocket your business growth.
