Lead Generation Strategies for Human-to-Human Companies

How to Use Empathy and Understanding to Attract People to Your Business

Do You Want to Generate More Sales-Ready Leads?

Of course you do…Who would say they have enough leads?

Getting the attention of interested prospects and setting up successful sales conversations isn’t as easy as it used to be. Prospective customers don’t want to be interrupted.

Today, everything is on-demand.

The question is HOW to generate more leads for your business. There’s no shortage of information on digital marketing tactics and strategies out there, but knowing where to start and focus your attention isn’t easy.

To generate inbound leads, you have to leverage helpful content at each stage of the buyer’s journey. You have to rethink how you communicate. You have to leverage the right technologies.

Above all, you have to be more human.

Adapting to the Way People Buy

Think about the last major purchase you made. You probably searched on Google, compared options, and checked online reviews before you pulled the trigger. Here is an example of a prospect’s path to becoming a lead.

Now think about how many businesses try to sell. Their sales reps call you out of the blue to tell you about themselves and their companies.

How would you feel about the first impression?

Watch a short video on why we need to be more Human to Generate Leads

What is a Lead?

A lead is a person who has the potential to become a customer or client. There are different types of leads depending on how your organization defines them. Here are some of the common ways they are categorized:

Lead: When you have the contact information for an individual, they are a lead. These people typically come from trade shows or referrals. They may or may know know your company, but haven’t engaged with your company.
Marketing Qualified Lead: If a lead shows intent to solve a problem by providing their contact information in exchange for information from your website. These individuals may attend a webinar on a specific topic, download an eBook, or another form of content. They are further in the buying process.
Sales Qualified Lead. When a lead is in the decision stage of the buying process, they will show stronger intent to purchase by requesting demos, consultations, or to speak to sales. These leads have the highest probability of becoming a customer—our favorite type of leads.

Once your sales team connects with them, builds rapport, and qualifies them through your sales process, they may eventually become a prospect.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting anonymous people into known leads. Many organizations still rely on cold calls and exhibiting at expensive industry trade shows to generate leads.

Not only do these outbound tactics run the risk of delivering a negative experience, but the lead generation efforts are not scalable.

By leveraging your online presence, you can generate leads around the clock, and throughout the year. More importantly, you give your sales team the ability to keep their pipelines full.

Here are the mechanics to get inbound leads through your website:

Relevant Content. By creating content for each stage of the buyer’s journey, you attract potential leads to your site.
Compelling Call-to-Action. To guide visitors to take the next steps, you have to craft a statement to get an immediate response.
Irresistible Offers. Valuable content that addresses the problems, needs, and interests of your target audience.

If you are starting to explore inbound lead generation, there are different disciplines to expand capabilities. Similar to learning a foreign language, you’ll get better with practice.

Lead Generation Disciplines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The process of maximizing the number of website visitors by ensuring the site appears on search results for targeted keywords by search engines.

Campaign Planning and Execution

Coordinated steps that include the promotion of a product/service through different mediums using a variety of different types of digital assets.

Social Media Marketing

Leveraging the right social networks to distribute content and increase brand exposure.

Marketing Analytics

The practice of measuring, analyzing, and managing marketing performance to maximize effectiveness and ROI.

Content Marketing

The process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract a clearly defined audience.

Conversion Rate Optimization

The process of optimizing the number of anonymous website visitors who convert into known sales leads.

If you need help in expanding internal capabilities, explore our Digital Marketing Services, Interactive Websites, or Inbound Marketing and Sales Training.

Ready to go deeper down the rabbit hole?

If you choose to continue doing what you are currently doing and expecting different results, you’ll wake up, and nothing will change. If you decide to change what you’re doing, and generate more leads, follow the steps below.

Take a self-assessment
Who is your primary buyer persona? How many website visitors do you get each month? How many leads are you currently generating?
Reverse-engineer your goals for leads based on sales targets
If you currently don’t have clear goals for the number of leads needed to reach your sales target, now is an excellent time to start setting them. By looking at benchmarks of your visitor to lead and lead to customer conversions, you’ll be able to set clear goals for the year.
Request a Free Lead Generation Assessment
If you’d like help with lead generation, we’re happy to get you started on the right track. Simply fill out the form below, and we’ll schedule a time to meet so we can learn more about your unique goals and challenges. Our conversation will help us to create a game plan to achieve them.