B2B Business Growth Essentials
A major challenge for business owners is knowing where to invest their hard earned profit in order to grow their business. Here are our top four areas in which modern businesses should allocate budget, areas which will directly result in more leads, sales and a measurable ROI.
Firstly, it is important to point out the fact that more leads aren’t necessarily a good thing. Having lots of bad quality leads will slow down your sales team, waste resources and significantly reduce your ROI. Needless to say, filtering out the bad quality leads will free up time and resources, as well as increase your sales conversion rates and funnel velocity. This means a more targeted and focused approach to your B2B lead generation and marketing strategy is far more likely to help you achieve your business goals.
How To Filter Out The Chaff And Make More Profit
Here are our top 4 most effective methods/tools to get good quality leads and filter out the bad ones:
- Problem focused content
- Lead nurturing capability
- A lead scoring capability
- Analytics
1. Problem Focused Content
Your buyers behavior has changed and your marketing efforts should follow if you want to stay ahead in your market. Buyers take their time and conduct a significant amount of online research before they reach their buying decision. Inserting yourself into their process by producing content based on your buyer personas’ needs and problems (as opposed to the benefits of your product/service) will get you heard, build trust, close sales and eventually beat your competitors.
This method, also known as inbound marketing, attracts good quality, qualified leads into your sales funnel making your conversion rates higher and your marketing efforts much more cost effective.
Traditional methods such as cold calling, buying lists and gathering details at trade shows generally find lower quality, cold (and irrelevant) leads, leaving your sales team wasting energy attempting to warm them up before they can even start thinking about making a sale.
The results of this approach are evident in Hubspots findings: Inbound leads cost 61% less (per lead) than outbound leads. When this inbound approach is combined with lead nurturing the effect on sales is even more amazing...
2. Lead Nurturing
- Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost (Forrester Research).
- 75% of leads are not ready to advance into the sales process, which significantly narrows down your window of success (Source: Gleanster Research).
- 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy. (Source: Gleanster Research)
Developing an automated lead nurturing strategy will save your sales team time as well as significantly increasing the chances of generating more sales. Creating relevant content for each stage your buyers go through to help them with their problems and influence their decision has a significant impact on sales conversion rates.
Without lead nurturing via content, business to business buyers will engage with your competitors who have mastered their lead nurturing process.
3. Lead Scoring
In order to master lead nurturing as a strategy, you need to implement lead scoring. Assigning your leads a score based on their behavioral and demographic information means you can market to them much more effectively, as well as know when they should be assigned to sales.
This approach ensures that your sales team aren't hassling your leads too early and allows them to focus their efforts on sales ready leads. Without this function leads can either be ignored or called by a sales person too early, both of which can have a very negative impact on your profit!
4. Analytics
Smart B2B businesses measure the effectiveness of their marketing pipeline. Using 'funnel maths' allows businesses to directly see the ROI of each marketing tactic that informs your overall marketing strategy. Armed with this information, CFO’s and CMO’s alike can gather financial data, figure out the cost per lead, and ultimately cost per sale, from each marketing activity. This means you can streamline your marketing activity and focus on the best cost per sale marketing tactics.
A Final Note
B2B companies don't need to spend more on marketing, they just need to spend their current budget more wisely. Reallocating the budget to online marketing, content marketing and marketing automation tools in order to increase return on investment, profits and reduce their cost-per lead is the future of B2B marketing.
To learn more about inbound marketing and how to align your marketing efforts with your buyers, download our free ebook here:
