Lead Generation Strategies

Beasley’s campaign lead generation strategies involve 11 important steps, which are described in detail in our hands-on guide, Why It Takes 7 to 13 Touches to Generate a Qualified Sales Lead available in our resources section. Here’s a quick summary of the steps:

1. Plan with the Perfect Customer in Mind
2. Clearly Define a “Sales-Ready Qualified Lead”
3. Quantify your “Sales-Ready” Lead Quota
4. Align Sales, Marketing and Management with Your Lead-to-Sale Plan
5. Segment Your Target Markets
6. Improve Target Prospect Data
7. Make Your Offer Compelling
8. Tell a Story with Your Content
9. Send an Email or Direct Mail as First Touches
10. Listen to Prospects and Engage with the Human Touch of a Phone Call
11. Track All Touch Metrics

As you can see, with lead generation strategies it’s important to decide what you want in a prospect and how many you need before you ever start planning creative and building a schedule for contacts. The definition of a “sales-ready lead” should come from Sales, not Marketing, and typically describes their business needs, their buying responsibility and the time frame for their purchase.

The job of a lead generation company is to attract the attention of these potential prospects and deliver them to the client’s sales force. Timing is particularly important: if they’re willing to talk to your sales rep at the beginning, you may be able to influence the specs for their purchase; if you wait until they’ve already made a list of vendors, then you have lessened your chance of winning. Through multiple touches, you can build awareness of your solution, so when the time is right for the first live sales contact it will be an easy transition.

Your campaign’s lead generation strategies can be planned internally, as long as you don’t miss any steps. However, we recommend you engage Beasley, a seasoned and professional lead generation company, at the beginning so we can advise on the right way to handle your evolving lead at each step on their journey to the signed purchase order.

Marketing Lead Funnel Audit

We’ve found through the marketing audit process there are three typical scenarios that cause leads to “leak” from your sales funnel.

First, prospects may research a product in many different ways, keeping you guessing on how to intersect with them at the right point in the marketing funnel purchase process. Prospects progress from awareness to consideration to purchase. It’s your job as a marketer to provide them with the right information at the right time in the marketing funnel and try to steer them to a purchase and qualify the ones who are ready to buy earlier in the process.

Second, as we’ve mentioned it can take 7 to 13 touches to qualify a prospect. The salesperson might give up and decide the lead is not interested after 2 or 3 touches, while the prospect isn’t ready to buy until touches 10-13. You need to execute on all the touches needed to deliver all of the qualified prospects available in a target list or segment.

Third, the sales department will only follow up on leads it feels meets certain criteria for Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe (BANT). However most marketing automation systems are imperfect in their scoring and rely heavily on landing page submissions to assess a prospect’s readiness to speak to a salesperson. This means a lot of leads get stuck in the middle of the marketing funnel with no way to progress.

The marketing audit process can tell you what is happening at each step in the demand waterfall lead-to-revenue sales process, and identify points at which you are losing prospects because you’re not giving them what they need at that moment. You can then support the sales department by filling in these leaks to continue nurturing leads toward the “sales-ready” stage.

In the Beasley marketing audit process we’ll typically interview your sales team, review your existing lead funnel and marketing automation process, and then make a detailed recommendation for improvement. Keep in mind that an effective multi-touch campaign will almost always include email, direct mail and teleprospecting and Beasley can provide any missing components, or execute your entire campaign.

Content Syndication Services

Content Syndication Services, also known as Content Distribution or a Guaranteed Leads Program (GLP) is an alternative way to fill the top of your sales funnel. Instead of running your own programs for business lead generation, you can ask Beasley lead generation services to bring you prospects generated through white papers or webinars that are promoted on the networks of reputable publishers.

There are a few caveats to this “sounds too good to be true” lead generation proposition. You need to define your business lead generation requirements very specifically to be sure there’s a good fit. These leads may not be familiar with your specific product, even though they’ve expressed a buying interest in a solution like yours, so you’re likely to work harder to qualify them. The qualification process will likely involve a teleprospecting call to further gauge their appropriateness and interest.

Because there are lots of questionable players in content syndication services and the distribution sphere, we recommend you let an experienced lead generation agency like Beasley to help you navigate to the best content networks and avoid the pain of paying for leads that aren’t valuable to your sales department.

Lead Qualification/Teleprospecting

Teleprospecting is very different from what consumers think of as “telemarketing”, because our objective is to identify qualified leads who welcome our calls and will be happy to talk to our sales team. As a professional telemarketing management company, we do lead qualification through a methodical process that starts with training the people on the phone. We want them to be respectful of their prospect’s time and knowledgeable about our client’s product or service.

Typically a teleprospecting call is part of a multi-touch campaign, following up on qualified leads that are an inbound prospect or an outbound email or direct mail contact. The telephone agent can repeat the offer and describe its benefits and often succeeds in converting a recipient to a qualified lead who shares intent-to-buy and timing. The agent can also probe about the prospect’s pain points or objections and offer a response that moves the sales process along.

We also use teleprospecting as a tool to fill in the gaps in your database when you are missing important information about qualified leads. A polite call from a professional-sounding individual can get answers that are not available any other way, and save both the prospect’s and the sales team’s time going forward in the sales process.

At Beasley, a telemarketing management company, we look at the telephone not as an annoyance, but as a premium enhancement when you want to do everything possible to ensure the success of a campaign. The more we know about the prospect’s needs, the better job we can do of filling them through your message.

Telemarketing Lists

We provide contact lists to our clients who are running multi-touch, demand generation campaigns and also to marketers who rent telemarketing lists on an ad-hoc basis. In both cases, the most important consideration for you as the telemarketing list buyer should be the quality of the contact information and buying interest.

Because using the telephone is more expensive than other forms of marketing, you can’t afford to put up with bad data. Yet corporate mobility is a reality of today’s economy, so we work hard to find lists that have been validated for accuracy of the prospect’s title and company identity. That makes it easier to find the right person or to be redirected if they’ve changed position.

We offer compiled telemarketing lists that are verified for currency and correctness that will get you into the C-suites of top companies in your marketplace. A Beasley telemarketing list can put you in touch with mid-level buying influencers who have expressed interest in learning about products like yours through their answers to surveys or other polling methods. And if needed we can create a custom list to fit a particular requirement, or update your own list with the latest names and titles. Call a Beasley telemarketing consultant today.

Email & Marketing Operations

Beasley is well versed on executing emails on sending platforms including Marketo, ExactTarget, and Silverpop. As part of our email and marketing operations services we can work seamlessly within your existing platform, or help you choose and get set up on a new platform including loading your data, setting up subscriber preferences, lead scoring, engagement engines, building complex nurture funnels, revenue engines, creating email templates, and integrating email marketing software with your CRM or sales automation system.

We also offer ad hoc email marketing services in which we create your emails and load your lists for transmission internally on your platform. At client request, we can play the role of your email sending staff or place a contract programmer at your facility to help strategize and implement the email campaign calendar. In short, we can do whatever it takes to get your email delivered without a hitch.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing can you help you on the following email and marketing automation platforms:

Marketo is a robust B2B marketing automation platform which hosts your email campaigns and landing pages and allows for complex lead scoring and nurturing. Our email programmers are Marketo Certified Experts.

SalesForce Marketing Cloud/ExactTarget is email marketing software used primarily for consumer email campaign management. Beasley is an ExactTarget Silver Partner. We are also experts in AMPscript, a proprietary ExactTarget scripting language that can be embedded within HTML emails, text emails, landing pages, and SMS messages. The system processes the script at the point where you include it in the message to render content on a subscriber-by-subscriber basis. This allows for highly personalized email messages that populate relevant data based on the subscriber’s preferences and behavior.

Act-On is a marketing automation solution designed to meet the needs of the small and mid-sized business, and the smaller marketing teams often working inside big enterprises. The Act-On platform is loaded with powerful cutting-edge capabilities, and we can help you implement Act-On in days rather than weeks. We can also help you integrate with other tools and your sales or customer automation platforms.

Silverpop provides flexible email marketing services used by both B2B and B2C companies. It includes an email sending service, behavior marketing, and marketing automation platform.

Need help choosing a service? We’ll be happy to advise you. The biggest factor is the level of personalization, data integration and dynamic content required. For B2B, lead scoring and nurturing capabilities are also important features we’ll help you evaluate.