3 Lead Generation Tactics for B2B Company in 2021

Published on May 10, 2021
3 min read
Sales
Icon Saphyte Team
3 min read
Updated:

Technology trends have accelerated in the past few months. With the pandemic making it hard for people to connect physically, strong preference for technology as a means to bring people together is expected. Society is shaped and reshaped continuously. And the year 2021 will be different for businesses.

Interesting trends are taking place in the online space now. What used to be hard to do for businesses before are now easier to do with automation. Business-to-business lead generation, in particular, can now be done with a software (a CRM software). The software user’s workload is now massively reduced as he just waits for leads to pop up in the system— no more manually typing in lead information. No more manually looking up for leads online. The software will do it for you.

In this article, we’ll discuss what a customer relationship management (CRM) software is and what it can do for your business. Then we’ll discuss what B2B lead generation is and how lead generation works. Then we’ll explore the best ways for B2B lead generation.

What is a CRM software?

CRM stands for customer relationship management and from the words themselves, the entire approach is all about ensuring that the customer stays with the business for a long time. CRM is also concerned with generating leads— engaging strangers (people who are not aware of the brand) and eventually encouraging them to explore the brand and its potential value.

After this, they turn into leads— cold, warm, or hot— and they are then convinced to make a first purchase. Now that they are effectively “customers” of the business, the challenge then is to make them stay, prevent them from becoming loyal customers of competitors.

So how does a CRM software do all these? Simple. The software is designed to simplify all the tasks involved in generating leads, managing customers, and engaging them. The software will have tools that make gathering lead information easy, pulling up customer information quickly, and sending engaging content automatically with minimal effort.

Simply put, the software is designed to streamline all your sales and marketing processes through centralizing tasks in one platform, providing tools for easy and quick performance of tasks, and even by automatically performing or completing tasks through automation.

To find out more about CRM and digital ecosystems, watch this video:

What is B2B Lead Generation?

B2B lead generation is a technique concerned with identifying customers that will potentially purchase from your business in the shortest possible time.

After listing these potential customers, businesses will then engage them through email, content, a phone call, or a combination of these.

B2B lead generation is an important activity for businesses that deal with other businesses by nature.

How Lead Generation Works

We might all be familiar with how lead generation works. Think about your favorite brand. And imagine a time where you still have no idea that that brand exists. The first question then is: how did you become aware that the brand exists? Then the questions evolve into: When did you make a first purchase from the brand and why? What made you realize you needed to make a purchase? Are you staying with the brand? Why? What is in the brand that its competitors don’t have?

To simplify the process, here’s how lead generation works:

1.Brand awareness:How did you come across the brand?

Here, customers are still at a stage where they are considered as “strangers.” They have no idea that your brand exists. And sales opportunities are virtually zero.

But these strangers have needs and wants. Sooner or later, by accident or by decision, they will come across your brand. That’s why if the business wants to focus on this part of the buyer’s journey, they should boost their brand awareness campaigns across important channels.

An example of this is the business sending out blogs for search engine optimization (SEO). So when a customer types in “best coffee in XX city,” your blog will appear in the search engine results page (SERP), especially when your blog is optimized for that search.

2.Sales conversion:What influenced you to make the purchase?

Here, the challenge is persuading potential customers to make a first purchase. What is in the brand that’s valuable to the customer? Why can’t they get such a sweet deal elsewhere?

Businesses should exert an effort to communicate their brand’s value to their leads. This can be done by sending them emails with useful and engaging content or by incentivizing them, through discounts or freebies, to purchase and try and experience the product.

3.Customer loyalty: What made you stay? What dissuades you from buying from the competitors?

Here, the challenge for businesses is to make their customers stay. There are a lot of reasons why customers won’t do this— a bad service, bad product, or just simply because they no longer need or want your product.

Identifying the reasons why customers churn is a challenge for businesses and sometimes it takes more than just asking them a question to gather this information.

So the usual pattern is this: strangers>leads>prospects>customers. And the challenge for businesses is to identify sales opportunities at every stage of the buyer journey and making leads stay in the pipeline.

What are the best ways for B2B Lead Generation?

In 2021, these are the proven ways to generate leads for B2B businesses:

Turning your websites into lead generation machines

Using your social media pages to gather customer information through forms

Launching email campaigns to get qualified leads

Let’s explore them down below.

1.Turning your websites into lead generation machines

This is one of the simplest ways to generate leads, and they don’t take so much effort too. All you have to do is configure your websites to collect information from your visitors and engage them accordingly.

This isn’t rocket science. Watch this video to learn more about landing page builders:

2.Using your social media pages to gather customer information through forms

With many leads getting active on social media during the pandemic, you wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity engaging them there. Through forms, you can achieve accurate customer profiling to engage leads with targeted content and successfully convert them into customers.

3.Launching email campaigns to get qualified leads

With the power of automation, users would no longer have to create emails and send them manually to targeted audiences. All they have to do is create an automated workflow and launch a drip email campaign that sends out emails based on schedule or upon triggering certain conditions (e.g. when a customer signs up, makes a first purchase, or when a lead did not respond in 48 hours).

Generate more leads using CRM

Find out how you can grow your business this year. Click here to get started.

Book a Demo
May 18, 2022