Generating business leads can be tricky. However, it is a vital part of every area of the sales process. You must have a promising pipeline of potential customers to increase your company’s bottom line. As such, it’s worth spending time grasping some of its fundamentals. You need to target many types of leads, each with its benefits. You also need to know the implications of their differences. Confused? Worry not.
In this blog post, we’ll go over six types of leads you need to be creating, take a detailed look at what each type means and some of the best sources to find them. By understanding each type of lead, you can also have an insightful takeaway of what’s the best for your business which can surely amplify your chances of success.
What is a B2B lead anyway?
Let’s first start with the basics, as it’s not quite as direct as you might think. But to simply put, a lead is a person or organization that showed an interest in what you’re selling or offering. Meanwhile, for a B2B lead, this specific context relates to the world of business-to-business sales. It is a term coin to those people identified as potential customers for your business.
There are various ways a lead can express their interest, but often, it’s by engaging with some facet of your company. They’ll usually share contact information with you, signalling they’re at least somewhat intrigued in further hearing more from your business.
But, of course, not all leads are unearthed equally. There are also certain ways to measure how engaged an individual is with your business. So, categorizing them will have an underlying impact on your approach to sales, including the stages of your sales.
6 Types of B2B Leads You Need To Create
Information Qualified Leads (IQL)
This type of lead exhibits specific quality, accuracy, and timely information delivery criteria. IQLs are essential to the success of a marketing campaign because they provide authoritative content that can use to drive leads. They also help provide authority when selling products or services to customers. IQLs are typically sourced from blogs, news articles, or white papers.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
MQLs are those leads who are deemed very likely to become paying customers as they have demonstrated interest in your product or service beyond sharing a phone number or email address.
They take further action to engage with your business reached through your marketing efforts. For instance, these leads may have repeatedly visited a page on your company website, filled out a form or multiple forms there, downloaded a piece of content your company has produced or signed up to attend one of your company’s masterclasses or webinars.
Sales Ready/Accepted Leads (SRL)
These leads have been prepped and are ready for sales reps to start reaching out to. They have been validated and pre-qualified to meet and complete the company’s sales expectations.
The validation process can include but is not limited to checking for accuracy, containing customers’ contact information, analyzing their website visit history, and being flagged as eligible for follow-up. They also likely may have asked to speak with a sales rep at your company and are ready to talk about the potential to do business with you.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
Moving from MQL, these leads are valuable assets that respond favourably to a salesperson’s initial contact, have a legitimate need for your product or service, and are ready for engagement or to take action with your sales team.
To be identified as an SQL, the lead must have shown interest in buying your company’s product or service, acted on that interest, and showcased the intent and ability to purchase. They can express their viable intentions in several ways, like engaging in a telephone conversation with a member of your sales team, sending an email or LinkedIn message, requesting more information about your company, and asking to show a demo of your product or service.
Member Service Request Leads (MSR)
MSRs are consumer-generated leads that come when a new member signs up for your service through the organization’s website or contact centre. They can be a valuable source of new customers as they render you the opportunity to engage with them straight away. In addition, new members will likely seek help or information when they sign up for your service. Creating and following up with Member Service Request Leads can help you capture their interest and convert them into regular customers.
Membership organizations usually use MSRs to manage and track requests from their members. They also send an MSR lean to the appropriate team member who can help address the request and follow up with the member if needed.
Referral Leads
These leads are individuals who another individual has recommended. Referred individuals are maybe friends, family, co-workers, or strangers who contacted a business or organization about a product, service, or opportunity they saw advertised or learned about through word-of-mouth. They are considered potential customers generated through referral programs, various marketing methods and targeted advertising campaigns.
What is a B2B lead generation?
B2B lead generation is a marketing process of contacting, convincing and converting other businesses into prospective customers in the form of sales leads. Likewise, it is a method of driving potential customers to their business organically.
Who manages B2B lead generation?
Sales and marketing professionals usually manage this process and may work alone or in teams. And for B2B lead generation to work most effectively, sales and marketing teams should be closely aligned and could ask for assistance from BPO companies.
Sales
The B2B lead generation sales team consists of two teams. And these teams execute separate, clearly defined tasks.
Business Development Managers (BDMs)
This team is in charge of conducting demos, closing deals and generating profits for the business. But aside from an in-house staff, companies can also work alongside business development firms to obtain business development outsourcing advantages like meeting their needs without having to bring on additional employees.
Sales Development Representatives (SDRs)
This team is in charge of sourcing and scoring leads, entertaining them and booking their meetings.
Utilising this approach has several benefits, like allowing you to create a solid B2B lead generation pipeline, empowering each employee to focus solely on one responsibility, and building a plan for career development and progression. In addition, if an SDR constantly hits their targets, it will become qualified for promotion to a BDM.
Marketing
The B2B lead generation team for marketing has two categories in general. And while their work may sometimes overlap, their marketing approaches differ.
Growth Hackers
This team is responsible for producing rapid revenue growth while spending as little as possible. They typically work at the early beginnings of startups and opt to be more experimental in approach, although the activities they take on are often less scalable.
Demand Generation Marketers
This team is responsible for the entire B2B lead generation revenue cycle. Its goal is to nurture leads, guide them to be aware of your brand, translate them into customers, and advocate. Despite their dissimilarities, these two groups have one thing in common: both rely on analysing data, testing their decision-making and are laser-focused on conducting a successful B2B lead generation.
Best Sources to Generate B2B Leads
At this point, you’re probably itching to know where to find targettable B2B leads. Well, there are several methods worth taking note of.
Content Marketing
Since content is highly imperative to have a promising lead
generation campaign, you must be able to back up your words and actions with compelling materials that can further sell your business. You can create valuable and
relevant content and promote them to your target audiences. It can take many forms, including social media posts, blogs, videos, eBooks, podcasts, and webinars.
Social Selling
In the B2B spectrum, the major social media network is LinkedIn. And to generate sales leads in this professional space, you must join groups related to your field and provide advice, insights, and expertise wherever possible when conversing. You must also constantly engage with them to develop relationships as time passes since social outreach is a buzzing trend that will remain relevant.
Outbound Email
This method is when you contact B2B leads, usually through email automation, in the hopes of striking up a conversation with them.
Cold Calling
This technique is somewhat outdated, but cold calling still has a commendable place in lead generation. It places you in direct contact with your B2B prospects, allowing you to create a good impression, such as explaining the benefits of your product or service and qualifying them for future engagement. It is manually operated or through automated technology to outsource cold calling from business outsourcing companies.
Customer Referrals
Your existing consumers can be a perfect source of new leads for your business as word-of-mouth news travels fast. It hinges on customer loyalty by your current leads, which can also generate new ones through their vetted recommendations.
Conclusion
To wrap things up, those were the types of b2b leads and how you can generate them. Indeed, getting acquainted with the ins and outs of qualifying and quantifying the prospects you want to attract to your business is worthwhile. With some strategic know-how, you’ll soon fill your sales funnel with people eager to do business with you.
If you want to experience how an excellent outsourcing marketplace like The Lead Enquiry can transform your B2B lead generation strategy with globally-compliant, high-quality data, contact us today.
