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Lead Generation

Lead generation is the marketing process of attracting anonymous web users to your content, capturing their interest, and converting them to a lead in your database for the purpose of developing a sales pipeline.

Generate More High Quality Leads For Your Sales Team

The first step towards growing sales and scaling revenue is to provide high quality leads to your sales team that close better than what they are doing now.

What is Lead Generation?


Why is Lead Generation Important?

The buying process has changed (for the better), and marketers need to find new ways to reach buyers. Furthermore the buyers are becoming much savvier and are beginning to direct the conversation rather than being sold to. Instead of finding customers with mass advertising and email blasts, marketers must now focus on being found and learn to build continuous relationships with buyers.

Do you ever hear any of the following about your leads?

“I want more leads. I want better leads.”

You’ll typically hear one of those two coming from sales on any given day/week/month. The reality is marketing/web leads are generally the best leads (and if they aren’t you’re doing something wrong). Any sales team worth their weight will eagerly devour more leads if you give it to them. It also enables a company to scale their sales organization and as a result grow company revenue.

A significant goal of any marketing team needs to be scaling up their lead generation program, and also improving it by locating leads that are likely to buy from you.

Using lead capture forms (in a tactful way) and offering valuable, engaging content is the best way to generate more leads. Lead scoring, a method of capturing lead quality can also enable a marketing team to only send the very best leads to sales.

“My leads don’t convert to sales and my sales team hates them.”

If you’re hearing that your sales team hates the leads they are being passed to by marketing there is something seriously wrong. Ideally they are wrestling each other to get them! beyond using measurements like close rates, you can gauge how good marketing leads are by the length a sales person will go to get them.

How is this accomplished? It’s never a good idea to hold marketing teams accountable for just increasing lead volume. If that’s their only measure of success then your leads are going to be total garbage.

By holding marketing accountable for close rates on their leads, or other deeper sales funnel metrics you’ll ensure quality is on the table.

“My website doesn’t convert. Cold calling works much better for us!”

This is a nightmare when you hear it because in all likelihood you’re just leaving money on the table because your website is terrible. The truth is, no matter the industry, your website should be your lead engine. If it’s not you need to take a serious look at it, and uncover all the ways in which it totally sucks as a lead capture tool.

For example – if your only lead capture form is a contact us form with 17 fields and a CAPTCHA box you are already doing it wrong.

Our advice is to invest some serious time and effort on an overhaul. In the meantime, some simple changes might have a dramatic impact. Offering useful content via lead capture form, streamlining usability, offering many ways to contact you easily are just a few of the ways. The best way to get started improving is to just get in and make these changes.

“I don’t know what is happening with my leads.”

Is sales following up on leads? If there is even a small piece of you that is concerned about this, there is a good chance that a problem exists. At the very least good leads are probably being dropped here and there. Most likely you have sales reps with no idea who to call and when. This is not an ideal situation by any means.

Many marketers will think that sales behaviours aren’t their problem but in actuality marketers can have a massive impact on ensuring the leads they are generating are actively worked for the biggest benefit to the company.

The best way to ensure all of your leads get followed up on properly by sales is to stop sending bad leads to them and to have visibility into sales output on those leads.

NorthIQ’s Top Tips for Generating More Higher Quality Leads for Your Sales Team

Don’t Annoy Your Potential New Customers

Many lead generation programs survive on the basis of pestering visitors to complete a form. You know those annoying pop-ups you keep having to close…those might generate leads but they are not engaging and positive means of doing it.

It is entirely possible to generate leads that sell using a positive and engaging methodology. Most marketers or marketing agencies avoid this because their main accountability is raw # of leads generated, not quality.

Focus on Quality over Quantity

NorthIQ employs a variety of digital channels and lead capture techniques that builds a lead pipeline for sales while actively engaging and delighting them in the process.

Offering valuable download content, or interactive tools on your website combined with a lead capture form you will generate more leads and they get something valuable out of the process. Using Level 1 forms (very few required fields) ensures that prospects are not annoyed by a gated floor plan and are much more likely to register. Level 3 forms gather a lot of information but succeeds by delivering extraordinary value to the lead.

Gated downloads requiring a small amount of information will ensure many web visitors will complete the form but it’s not intrusive or invasive. It gets leads into the CRM initially for a low investment (for them), and delivers the download to their inbox. It provides value immediately, and encourages them to open subsequent emails and engage happily with your marketing content.

Generate Valuable Content That Will Delight Your Prospects

I know I know, I’ve heard it all before. Why would we give something away for free? It costs money to create content!

The fact is to generate leads, engage them with your business, and ensure they are ready to buy you need to offer them some value for very little in return. The idea here is to generate some content in the form of a download, or webinar that will offer some value without giving them all the value of your product/service. Let me give you an example – if your business sells hot pepper seeds, you might offer planting instructions, or a hot pepper scale.

Ensure that you make creating this content and using it as a lead generation tool a priority.

Don’t “Throw” Leads Over the Fence to Sales

A lot of marketing organizations wash their hands of the sales process once a lead gets to sales. The correct way to approach this is to form a partnership with sales wherein the marketing group has a hand in the quality of leads delivered. A good marketer will understand the sales pipeline, understand the issues sales face, and attempt to deliver only the best leads.

Deliver marketing organizations insight into the sales process!

An Outline of the NorthIQ 3i Lead Generation Program

We designed this system after carefully examining how leads progress along the buyer’s journey, and how we can help them in the entire process.

By combining a simple three level nurturing system with gated content and continuous nurturing, we can reliably lead your prospects along a buyer’s journey. All paths contain a call to action for the prospect to reach out for a phone call at any time in the process.

Level 1: Introduce
Introduce the concepts that make up your core product or service, and provide easily consumable, valuable short form downloadable content. The idea of this content is to get people into your database as quickly as possible by giving them a piece of content that answers key questions about your business while also providing value to the potential lead. This involves a low friction form, which requires minimal data to receive this content.

Level 2: Inform
Inform your prospects about specific products or services you offer, showcasing the benefits of your solution and how your unique value proposition is integral to the product or service.

Level 3: Interact
Interact with your leads, to collaboratively create content which provides excellent value. This may include a calculator or a planning tool which they can use to generate different scenarios. These scenarios will result in a customized download.

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