Creating a Winning B2B Lead Generation Strategy From Scratch

A strong b2b lead generation strategy requires more than just a list of tactics. It requires sales and marketing teams to come up with a collaborative process that defines quality leads and prioritizes sales follow-up.

A key component of this process involves crafting a unique value proposition. This value proposition communicates the benefits your solution provides to its target audience, and it should differentiate you from your competitors.

Defining Your Target Audience

One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make is aiming their marketing and sales efforts at anyone who might be interested in their products or services. This approach is not only time consuming and costly, but it will also result in a poor return on investment.

To avoid this mistake, it is essential to define your target audience. This process involves identifying the demographics and psychographics of your ideal customers to ensure that your sales and marketing efforts are aligned with their needs and interests.

To identify your target audience, conduct market research and surveys to understand their challenges, pain points, and buying habits. Once you have a clear picture of your target audience, you can create a compelling value proposition that highlights the unique benefits that your product or service offers. By demonstrating how your solution solves their problems and addresses their needs, you can generate qualified leads.

Identifying the Ideal B2B Leads

Unlike consumer marketing, B2B sales are long-term relationships that require a lot of time and investment. This is especially true for high-priced, complex solutions like accounting software or industrial machinery.

Knowing your ideal customer profile (ICP) is a fundamental step in identifying the best prospects to target with your marketing campaigns. Without a clear understanding of who you’re selling to, your efforts will be scattershot, which leads to low conversion rates and an inefficient sales process.

Identifying potential customers also requires understanding their buying journey. You need to know where they are in the process of researching their options and how they perceive your solution as a viable option. To do this, companies often employ tools like heat mapping and email marketing to track their customer behavior and gather insights. For example, office wallpaper company WallMonkeys used a heat map tool to determine when their website visitors were most interested in learning about different products and services. They then targeted them with email newsletters.

Crafting a Compelling Value Proposition

A strong value proposition is an essential component of a successful business strategy. It explains the benefits that your product or service provides to customers, and distinguishes your company from competitors.

To craft a compelling value proposition, you must understand your target audience’s needs and pain points. This involves conducting research to identify their challenges, aspirations, and buying behaviors. It also requires analyzing your competitors to recognize what sets you apart from them.

Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, you can craft a unique value proposition that will differentiate your business from competitors and attract potential customers. When crafting your value proposition, be sure to focus on the benefits rather than the features of your product or service. For example, Apple’s value proposition for the iPhone is not based on its sleek design or powerful features; it is based on how the product can solve a customer’s problems or fulfill their desires in ways that other products cannot.

Developing a Lead Scoring System

Getting the right people to convert to sales requires a careful prioritization and qualification of leads. A lead scoring model will help your marketing and sales teams focus on the best contacts and avoid wasting valuable time on low-quality leads.

In a nutshell, lead scoring models classify prospects by the way they fit with your business and how much interest they have in your product. They assign a score to each prospect that prioritizes high-commitment behaviors (e.g. requesting a quote from the sales team) while giving less points to lower-commitment actions (e.g. clicking through a newsletter CTA).

Prioritizing and qualifying leads by creating a scoring criteria ensures that sales and marketing teams can cultivate the most potential customers. This also helps them meet their sales quotas and drive revenue growth. If you want to take your lead scoring a step further, predictive lead scoring — an AI-driven process that predicts the likelihood of a lead making a purchase based on past behavior data — offers more practicality and accuracy.