How to Improve Lead Generation from Larger Companies

In the past, improving leads in a marketer-centric world consisted of making cold calls, sending cold emails, and interrupting people with annoying ads.

There is still a certain amount of this going on today, but if you want your business to be perceived as a helpful subject matter expert or trusted advisor, you must take a client-focused approach— an inbound-centric approach. The inbound approach is focused more on specific keywords and topics especially relevant to who your buyer personas are and the problems they are looking to solve.

Blogging and Social Media

Blogging is an essential tool for businesses to use. Instead of interrupting prospects, blogs look to attract them to you. Stop pitching and sharing self-serving stuff on social media; only your clients and employees care about your award announcements.

Additionally, if you have a conference booth great, all your employees should clap for you. However, are strangers that have never heard of your company and do not know about the products or services your company offers going to care about the trade show—which is not even relevant to them?

Many companies use the phrase “Buy Now,” or offer price promotions and discounts on social media, but these tactics are so far off the reservation from being helpful, and educational.

Just stop pitching and focus more on helping, educating, teaching, and solving their problems— not yours. You will have time to solve your problems later on in the buyer's journey (in the last ten to twenty 10%-20%), but early on, it is all about your potential buyers.   

Premium Content

Placing premium content behind landing pages and well-placed call-to-actions (CTAs) are critical to reaching your buyer personas in the right buyer’s journey stage. You should not be blogging, emailing, using social media, or putting up website pages without thinking through where your CTAs should be going.

Similarly, with all of your offline efforts, you should strategize what the logical CTA for particular offers is.  For instance:

• What do you want somebody to do that comes by your tradeshow booth?
• What do you want somebody to do that attends your breakfast seminar?
• What do you want somebody to do after a tour?

CTAs are road maps that connect the puzzle pieces together. Overall, focus on being hyper-specific and ridiculously relevant if you want to attract leads.       

Successful Lead Generation

You cannot abdicate successful lead generation to marketing; marketing has too much control, and you need to work with them. Become successful at generating leads by attending webinars or reading blog posts, so you know what you need to do to generate leads.

Even if you have an internal marketing team, they cannot be successful unless they have cooperation from you, your CEO, and your sales team. Marketing cannot work on its own anymore; there has to be a strong alignment between marketing and sales.

Whether they realize it or not, in many cases, sales are subject matter experts. Marketing should be leaning on sales, as they have field experience and great war stories. Marketing does not have to spend much time with sales, just enough time for about four-to-six interviews or ideas.

Marketing can make the difference in moving the needle; when that is being done, your sales team is more likely to share content, blogs, and premium content on their own social media and build up their social media following to help attract more net new leads and accelerate their leads into opportunities.

Bottom Line

All of this should be done with your buyer personas in mind, as they are super important for improving lead generation and gaining more leads.

There has to be a feedback loop; it is impossible to do any of the above lead-generating tactics without having a CRM system everyone genuinely wants to use. There has to be a way to close the loop on which marketing activities led to the outcome of a desirable sale.

Accordingly, if there is a whole bunch of marketing activities and lead generation being done that does not lead to the right sales outcomes, you can stop doing it, and reallocate resources to the right places.

Does your company want to improve lead generation from larger companies? Let us know in the comments below.

If you are interested in learning more about how to become successful at lead generation, enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.