Sales lead generation is a mixture of marketing and sales in which the business determines and connects to potential sales leads such as prospective clients or customers. Generally, the company’s sales or marketing department is the one in charge for generating sales leads. After identifying the sales leads, the sales team will reach out to the consumer or client to close the sale. Ideally, there should be a lot of information that can be extracted from the sales lead in order to acquire new customers.

An effective lead generation campaign typically contains the list, offer, medium, and fulfillment. It also has its emphasis on three core components: producing a campaign that has multiple touches, creating a compelling offer, and incorporating a human touch (telemarketing).

Ironically, generating more leads is the topmost obstacle in generating sales leads. Other common challenges include enhancing the quality of leads, boosting brand awareness, limited budget, developing a relevant content, converting leads into clients or consumers, developing a marketing strategy, and understanding the consumers’ intention and purchasing behaviors.

B2B and Sales Leads

The primary focus in B2B marketing is to generate sales leads. Therefore, it is inevitable for B2B marketers to have setbacks in the course of providing sales leads. This can be ascribed to not having a good grasp of the nuances in marketing B2B goods and/or services. Problems arise in generating sales leads especially when the sales are complex. Because of this, B2B marketers design and utilize efficient B2B lead generation campaigns.

Ways to Generate Sales Leads

According to a survey conducted by InsideSales, the most widely used technique in generating leads is through the Internet (a company’s webpage, e-mail, social media). Conventional methods, such as direct mail and print ads, and events like webinars and sponsorships, are still used by marketers but not as often as the Internet usage. Customer or partner referrals and establishing a relationship with prospects can also be used in generating sales leads. Businesses can also sponsor and give a presentation at trade shows, conventions, or industry events. This helps the company to be recognized and later on, generate leads or attract new clients or customers.

For IT companies, using pay per click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), and search engine marketing (SEM) are the best ways to generate sales leads due to its cheap cost. To intensify the effectualness of these techniques, it is suggested to use “long-tail keywords” since these phrases generate the targeted traffic because of their specificity. In addition, creating blogs, whitepapers, webinars, and other types or forms of informative content can generate sales leads and establish trust with the customers.

Social media has proven its powers in the virtual sphere. In fact, LinkedIn and Twitter are the most common social media platforms that businesses use in generating sales leads. Since LinkedIn users are mostly professionals, it is easy for B2B marketers to reach out to their target audience. Moreover, because of Twitter’s hashtag features, it becomes convenient for the company to look for prospective consumers and advertise their products or services.

Tools in Sales Lead Generation

Aside from the discussed conventional methods above, companies can use these tools in generating sales leads.

  • Jigsaw
    Jigsaw is a database of connections. When subscribers share a contact, they will earn credits that they can use to purchase other contacts. Alternatively, they can use money in doing this. Jigsaw provides contact information such as name, e-mail address, home address, among others. Subscribers can look for contacts using filters such as company, country, state, city, industry, size of employees, Fortune rank, etc.
  • InfoUSA
    InfoUSA provides leads in the form of email contacts and postal/phone contacts. Some of the selection criteria are as follows: international, bankruptcy, new businesses, business or consumer specialty, credit ratings, and expenses.
  • Hoover’s
    Hoover’s allows its subscribers to create their own list and run their own searches. Search filters include geography, industry, business information, salary, rate of employee growth, ranking, and financial stability rating.
  • Sales Genie
    Aside from the usual search filters provided by other sales generation tools, Sale Genie has an extensive classification of search outcome: summary, business information, industry profile, expenses, businesses near the area, credit score, company news, etc.