Best Practices for Building Your Lead Generation Strategy
Do you have an all-star lead generation strategy? Do you even know? For many companies, lead generation is a key initiative for the sales and marketing teams, but they often don’t put enough thought into their strategy. Ready-Fire-Aim is the strategy that most companies employ. The following are some best practices that every company should address before launching their lead generation initiatives.
Start with Segmentation
Do you know who your top target segments are? Everyone probably has an idea of whom they want to go after, but most companies have not identified the top segments. In order to achieve this, you need to map out the total market and then identify your company’s sweet spots. These sweet spots can help you define just what segments of the marketplace your company should target. Try to identify segments based on where your company has a competitive advantage. The only way to truly identify this is to scope out potential competitors and to identify their strengths and weaknesses as well. While scoping out your competition, you may also come across other companies that may actually pose a strategic partnership. Once you have a clear definition of what segments to target, you can then start to develop prospects lists for each segment.
Give Them a Persona
One area where most companies fall short is taking the time to truly understand what makes your prospects tick. In order to understand your prospects better you need to develop a persona for each target segment. For each persona, you need to determine their pains and needs as well as recognize their business drivers. Most importantly, you need to understand their buying criteria and process.
Do You Have The Correct Team?
Often, the lead generation team is comprised of whomever has enough time to do the project. Or it falls on marketing alone without much involvement from sales. This is only asking for failure. Instead, you need to identify who will lead a multi-disciplined team (sales and marketing) to help understand your customers better, but also help build your internal process that maps to how your customers buy. Sometimes this means bringing in resources outside of sales and marketing.
Get the Correct Equipment
While the tools your team uses are only as good as the team itself, it’s still important to make sure they have the right tools to get the job done. This means that you need the correct tools for your email marketing, analytics, and social monitoring. However, it also includes making sure that you have the right assets to power these tools. Do you have guides, blogs, webinars, videos etcetera that map to each stage in your customers buying process and are designed to move them along in their buying process? If not, you need to take the time and develop these assets before you launch your program.
Do you need outside help?
With technology changing so rapidly, how your customers buy is an ever-evolving process. For many companies having the expertise to stay up to date with all these changes can be very hard. In order to fill these gaps, you may need to look to cost effect outside resources to help you. From understanding your customers better to integrating your entire back end systems outside resources can help keep costs down while keeping you up on the latest best practices. They can also be a great source for asset creation, staff training, and campaign performance analysis.
The Bottom Line
For most companies, their lead generation strategy is their lifeline to growth. Leaving this to a ready-fire-aim approach just doesn’t deliver the results that are needed. Instead, you need to take the time to understand your market better, and make sure you have the process and team on board to deliver maximum results. By following these best practices, you will be in a position to maximize revenue and minimize costs.
Want to learn more about how to build a lead generation engine that has these best practices built into it? Check out this free guide.
The Executives' Guide to Building a Lead Generation Engine
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