Lead Generation Strategies That Begin With “L”

Today we explore several different ways to create demand with the letter “L”.

Lead Scoring. Not all leads are created equal. In many cases, inbound leads are being sent directly to the sales team. Whether they are web to lead, or call to lead, sales teams are inundated with a large quantity of requests. From marketing’s standpoint, this is typically considered good, but from sales it isn’t because the majority of those requests are not sales-ready leads. Enter lead scoring. Lead scoring is the process of automatically qualifying and screening inbound requests for the purposes of determining which requests are really leads and which ones aren’t. The sales ready leads are usually then sent either to the sales team or to an inside sales/telemarketing function for further qualification. Leads that are not ready to buy are held back in an incubation or nurturing program, until they exhibit signs of buying behavior. Lead scoring works by reducing the overall number of opportunities, but increasing the conversion rate, shortening the sales cycle, increasing average deal size and increasing overall revenue. The analogy is simple: give salespeople high quality at-bats, and more often than not will knock it out of the park. Lead scoring works best when you marry both explicit data such as budget, authority, need and timeline with implicity behavior such as website visits, downloads, and webinars attended.

Lead Nurturing. Lead Nurturing, Lead Incubation, Lead Harvesting is the process of continuously marketing to leads that are not sales ready. Many times after sales disqualifies a lead, it falls into a black abyss. Or worse, marketing spends more money and time to reacquire the same lead over and over again. With lead nurturing, you use marketing automation to leverage channels such as email, direct mail, microsites and telemarketing to send a continous series of messaging to your prospects. When the prospects display buying behavior, they are then routed to a salesperson for follow-up.

Linking. Linking is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and optimize your position in search engine rankings. Identify complementary partners, associations, industry boards and other websites where it would make sense to have a link pointing back to your site. You then reciprocate. You have now turned the power of the web to your advantage by leveraging everyone else’s position to amplify your own. This is easy to do and very cost-effective.

List Acquisition. Ideally, you want to grow your house list organically. But sometimes, it does make sense to acquire a list if you are just starting out or entering a new market. There are a number of good list brokers out there. Do your homework and try to use as much criteria as you can to build a highly targeted and relevant list. Keep in mind that even the best lists will never be more than 80% accurate due to shifting patterns. Leverage off-shore calling centers for a few bucks per call to validate the names on the list and obtain email permission (usually about 20% of the time).