A Guide to Business Growth Through Lead Generation

Lead generation is the use of appropriate tools and techniques to attract prospects and generate organic traffic of potential customers that, in turn, purchase the existing products and services of a manufacturer or service provider. Businesses providing lead generation services are paid a finder fee for generating the leads. Using lead generation tools, the desired leads are attracted with minimum but personalized efforts. When done efficiently, lead generation can help reduce wasted spend in B2B marketing efforts.

These tools provide helpful customer insights that help businesses understand the reasons behind some marketing efforts' failure or less-than-expected success rates. In turn, enterprises adapt and only focus resources on good workflows and customer segments. Lead generation also uses effective scoring system filters, lead magnets, and Search Engine Optimized content to increase customer reach.  

Lead generation finds importance in all organizations undergoing the requirement of growing their customer base to stay profitable and relevant. Retailers, restaurant owners, and service providers rely on lead generation for customer revenue. Furthermore, recruiters, call centers, insurance companies, and B2B businesses also find great use in lead generation companies. Webinars, giveaways, referral rewards, quizzes, affiliate marketing, and joint ventures are all examples of lead generation. 

Successful lead generation that significantly increases customer reach sequentially follows these five steps:

Step 1: Capturing Leads

Lead generation begins with designing activities to reach prospects, like sending emails, using paid advertisements, website content, or social media marketing. Any good lead management software automatically feeds every lead into the organization’s CRM system and ensures that no prospects are lost.

Step 2: Tracking Leads

Software is used for tracking leads. The lead's online profile is automatically populated with publicly available information. Such valuable insights improve the lead managers’ understanding of customers and enable them to offer tailored sales campaigns by using a sales approach with lead generation tools. 

Step 3: Qualifying Leads.

Some managers use a contact scoring model that ranks contacts in this lead generation stage. The factors behind these rankings include the prospects’ demographic information, the offerings of the business, their engagement with the organization’s content, and their buying journey with your company. 

Step 4: Distribute Leads Among Sales Reps.

Managers assign leads to the best sales reps available at this lead-generation stage. These reps contact leads the soonest as possible to enhance the likelihood of their conversion. A robust lead management system can automate assigning leads to sales reps so they can quickly prioritize assigned leads and prevent delays.

Step 5: Nurturing Leads

Some leads take longer to turn into buying customers. Therefore, they need to be sent nurturing campaigns to sufficiently educate them about your offering. In the 5th and last stage of lead generation, managers share promotional offers and share information regarding the value of their products/services and urge prospects to become ready for conversion. 

Customer Relationship Management guides a company in its lead generation activities by taking practical steps based on data insights. Through the effective combination of lead management tools and CRM, the regions generating the most leads can be identified, so those conversion efforts are majorly focused on those regions. This prevents the wastage of valuable resources in areas with poor conversion rates, automates redundant and prolonged tasks, and drives efficiency.

Using a lead scoring system, businesses relying on lead generation can prioritize the most profitable leads, use an excellent nurturing strategy, and effectively assign leads to the right sales reps to convert the top prospects into customers.  

This means CRM is used in lead generation to identify leads. The advantages of lead generation tools are that they ensure that customers are not bothered with irrelevant and redundant information. A good CRM platform reduces the manual workload for the employees and improves the overall customer experience, increasing the likelihood of their retention. At the same time, there are several lead generation solutions available in the market.

Detailed reviews have revealed some of the best CRM platforms for lead generation to be:

• Agile CRM
• Bitrix24
• Dynamics 365
• HubSpot Marketing Hub
• LeadConduit
• Pipedrive
• RollWorks
• Salesflare
• Salesforce Sales Cloud
• Zoho CRM

Lead generation activities make the categorical data organization more relevant for its targeted market. Websites are built and optimized to gather leads and collect their information using contract forms. Besides enhanced reach, appropriate lead generation can equip a business with personalized marketing campaigns, aid in identifying the right leads, and nurture leads with buying intent.

The significance of lead generation in the growth of companies is considerable. When sales teams observe a saturation of businesses with similar offerings in an area, it discourages them from putting in the efforts to set roots in the place; however, adequately conducted lead generation can enable them to make room and even capture a large share of the market. Understanding the difference in MQLs vs HQLs can help you further hone your lead generation strategies. Besides generating more organic customer traffic, lead generation enhances brand awareness and fills up the sales funnel for a business organization. 

Compare the best lead generation tools by referring to our CRM software page and select the best lead generation tool that will streamline your sales pipeline.