B2B lead generation is the heart and soul of sales development.

Marketers know that growth and profitability are a prerequisite for business continuity and the best way to achieve this is by onboarding new customers.

It’s why marketers continuously strive to find ways of generating new leads for nurturing.

With global acceptance of digital marketing, you can now leverage digital lead generation strategies to spike interest among intent-rich leads.

We’ll look at five of these strategies below.

1.  Invest in Lead Generation Software

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could find an optimized tool to help you find qualified leads?

It would mean no more manually (and possibly tediously and erroneously) entering data to find organizations that are potentially interested in your solutions.

It would also mean that your team focuses on developing apt campaigns while the tool materializes the demand and fills your funnel.

When choosing these fantastic tools, consider the following:

• User-friendliness. Software that comes with steep learning curves and unfriendly interfaces may intimidate your team and even have them shun it.
• Scalability. The purpose of investing in this software is to grow your business. Will the software adjust with growing needs? Will there be extra costs with every change? Worse, will you need to purchase another tool to handle the extra capacity?
• Reporting and analytics. How easily can the tool calculate ROI or gather and analyze campaign data? Your team will need the information to analyze performance and deduce insights to improve future campaigns.

2.  Use Social Proof

In a B2B consumer review utilization survey, respondents stated they would likely purchase a brand’s solutions if they read a trustworthy review about them. And 92 percent of them no less.

Say you offer excellent solutions but aren’t using social proof to get the word out. A prospective customer may check out your website and then head over to the competition.

If your competitor’s website contains customer reviews, well-packaged case studies, and extensive portfolios of company executives, guess who the prospect will buy from?

Here are some ways to incorporate social proof to encourage lead generation:

• Include numbers. “We’ve helped 80 percent of our customers do xxx” or “x number of companies are using our xxx (solutions).” Rock your hard-earned numbers to prove you’re worth your salt.
• Awards. Industry-relevant formal acknowledgments like badges and awards illustrate your expertise and capability. Show them off on your landing pages, social pages, email signatures, and websites.
• Create case studies. These go into detail about how you tackled a customer’s problem, identified the best solution, and the outcomes enjoyed. Be sure to include statistics, infographics, and videos for eye relief and clearer illustration.
• Endorsements. Endorsements by businesses you’ve helped, thought leaders, industry analysts, and influencers add weight to your credibility and usefulness. These people can offer unique insights into how you work or your innovations and creativity to encourage others to engage.

3.  Make Cold Calls

Today’s cold calling is no longer about shooting arrows in the dark, hoping to strike something or someone.

Teams use marketing intelligence and data (like search intent data) to narrow down their list of targets and increase their success rate.

They then research these target companies’ needs and package attractive solutions to encourage contact persons and buying committees to consider them.

We recommend the following:

• Let your conversations evolve organically. As your script recommends a certain flow to help lead the prospects along the path to your goal, you’re likely to encounter knowledgeable prospects. If you insist on starting from the top so you can follow your “order” only demonstrates ineffectiveness and may even kill the conversation.
• Speak like a peer. A friendly one, I might add. Familiarize yourself with their industry’s lingo and refer to the prospect by their first name. It doesn’t just help level the playing field but also creates an “insider” perception.
• Be patient with your prospect. It’s likely the prospect will have questions and seek clarifications, meaning you may need to repeat certain things. Do so patiently and keep a friendly tone, or you might trigger the prospect the wrong way.

4.  Incorporate Live Chat

Some buyers find engaging sales reps over the phone a little intimidating and fear being pressured into buying.

Live chat allows them to learn about your solutions in an informal and non-intrusive way.

Best practices include:

• Setting up proactive messages to invite visitors to communicate. From automatically triggered greetings to sharing links to your product/services pages, and newsletter opt-ins, create specific rules to catch your visitor’s attention timely.
• Using offline forms. You can remain a friendly business even when your team is away by activating offline forms alongside greetings and a promise to reach out soon. The people who leave their contact information are interested in hearing from you so be sure to contact these leads in the quickest time possible.
• Watching out for signs of cart abandonment. Complex checkout processes, unexpected costs, and trust issues can all lead to cart abandonment. Set up triggers to alert your team when a customer is about to bounce and reach out immediately and salvage the situation.

5.Leverage Your Competition

Many businesses tend to “ignore the competition” and focus solely on pushing their products/services their way. They worry that paying attention to their competitors will only distract and demotivate them.

But in the real sense, all you’ll be doing is missing crucial information to improve your offerings and opportunities for growth.

Here are ways you can benefit from spying on the competition:

• Compare solutions. As prospects inch closer to making that final decision aka choosing a vendor, they will spend more time comparing the different solutions availed to them. You can sway them your way by offering fair comparisons and demonstrating your competitive advantage.
• Study social media posts. Listening to what their followers are saying or complaining about will help you discern unaddressed pain points and content gaps. A social media management tool can make your work much easier by gathering feeds from multiple sources in one place.
• Carry out SEO competitor analysis. Look up the phrases they rank for then check if it will be worth your while to compete for the same or work on others. You can go further and analyze the websites your competitor is using to build backlinks and reach out to them to link your own.