For most small to mid-size technology and consulting firms, the biggest growth challenge is finding new sales opportunities. And few have figured out how to do this on a sustainable basis.
As you grow past a certain point, the yo-yo diet of referrals is no longer enough. Hiring more sales people might be the logical next step, but the one thing they dislike more than anything else is the process of finding new opportunities.
Whether you call it prospecting, demand or lead generation – finding new sales opportunities has always been difficult. But the reality is it continues to get harder and harder.
Time poor prospects have become increasingly difficult to engage, and old fashioned promotional tactics are either ineffective or unscalable in the modern age.
Prospecting best practice
The only sure way to get the attention of your target audience is to consistently provide them with information they are genuinely interested in. No tricks. No thinly-veiled sales pitches. Mostly, it comes down to information that helps them solve their problems or provides new insight to help them make or save money - or reduce risk.
Once engaged, the right messaging is then key to build out a sales story that leads prospects toward your proposition, but in a compelling and believable way.
The next major step is to deliver this content and messaging at scale and at the right time in your buyer’s journey, which means leveraging data, technology and automation across all of your key channels.
Traditional tools such as the phone should still be used, but are most effective when following-up on warmer prospects who have first engaged in some way with your content.
Let’s face it, cold calling a list of prospects is a significant expense due to the huge amount of time involved versus the low rate of response. It's simply a numbers game - by the law of averages, eventually you'll find someone in a buying cycle.
So, cold calling does 'work', but it is the sales and marketing equivalent of throwing mud at a wall knowing some of it will stick. But it ranks near the bottom of lead generation effectiveness, when done in isolation.
Few would argue that there has to be a smarter way to find new sales opportunities.
Question 'how' not 'what'
What is described above is a very simplified and rudimentary summary of best practice when it comes to B2B demand generation. But it's a framework that many firms do not follow.
Rather, they regularly question their current tactics as to whether they are effective, and if not, then maybe they will prioritise a different set of activities. Telemarketing and email not working, let's focus on events and Linked-In etc.
But it's this focus on continually challenging 'what' is done that leads firms to chop and change and ultimately limits success - because no momentum is ever built.
The real questions should be centred around 'how' things are done, as opposed to 'what' is done. For example, if a company has been blogging for some time but has yet to see results it is nonsense to claim that blogging in general doesn't work. It is more likely that the blog is not reaching its target audience, or the topics aren't relevant to their needs - or it simply lacks quality or consistency in some way.
Of course, it's important to choose the right tactics for your business and prioritise what works. But you must avoid the tactical merry-go-round that stifles progress. Give your activities time and make changes to the approach, not the tactic, before choosing to do something else.
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Putting it all together
Making lead generation work in practice (to deliver results) is actually a relatively sophisticated combination of research, data segmentation, strategy and tactics. Technology underpins nearly every aspect and content is the fuel to power your efforts.
As such, how well the process is carried out is mostly reliant on who is actually doing the work. SEO is a great illustration of this point. There are thousands of SEO companies who you could work with, but results will vary dramatically depending on who you choose.
It's no different with lead generation. If you want to take a more modern approach, is your sales team the right answer?
The truth is that sales people in general aren’t great with technology. And they are even worse when it comes to creating content. So if you rely solely on sales, they will inevitably revert back to what they know - old school prospecting tactics.
The most qualified place to turn is marketing. But it’s a function that many firms have a difficult relationship with.
Question marks over marketing
Years of random acts of marketing - yielding little or no return - have taken their toll. False dawns, bad advice and ‘Emperors new clothes’ haven’t helped either. For some, belief in the discipline itself has waned.
Confidence will only be restored when business leaders see results. But that first means taking a leap of faith to entrust marketing with the responsibility - in parallel with the sales function - for finding new opportunities.
Understandably, there is a reluctance to trust marketing, especially if previous attempts have not lived up to expectations. But the likelihood is that the perceived failures of the past have been the product of one-off campaigns, projects or when a punt has been taken on a supposedly new approach. Yet marketing effectiveness should never be judged on a single activity and silver bullets are extremely rare.
Mastering the fundamentals of marketing is the real key to its effectiveness. And again it comes down to ‘how’, not ‘what’ you execute that makes all the difference.
This means how you go about understanding what your buyers really care about. How you develop your sales story. How you create compelling content, How you develop your website. How you utilise marketing technology. And how you bring it all together. Under-invest in this capability and it's unlikely you'll get the results you need.
Many B2B marketing experts say you must do things differently. But that’s just not sustainable. New ideas catch-on so quickly that any window of opportunity is normally gone before you know it. Sure, there are plenty of opportunities for innovative and creative ideas, but the foundations are all the same.
So, better lead generation means doing the same as everyone else - only better than everyone else. It means getting your marketing operation to run like a well-oiled machine. It may take time, but the payoff is having a function that is able to generate sales opportunities on a sustainable basis, significantly reducing the reliance on your sales team.
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