B2B Lead Generation

Here at Walker Sands, lead generation for our B2B clients is core to every marketing activity we undertake. Our Chicago firm guides company growth with the B2B lead generation you need to compete in today’s business environment. What are today’s buyers seeking? Which decision-makers need to be reached first? Walker Sands has answers you can turn into action. Our B2B lead generation methods will identify quality prospects and help solidify new business relationships that keep you ahead of the competition.

Walker Sands brings success to B2B lead generation by using methods attuned to the pulse of your industry. Our involved, effective strategy emphasizes your company’s strengths and matches them to your most promising prospective clients.

Adopt a systematic and effective B2B lead generation approach. Put your best foot forward. Step into a new era with Walker Sands.

Successful Tips for B2B Lead Generation

In B2B tech marketing and PR, lead generation is an important goal for brands that want to succeed in a competitive business environment. Factors like what today’s buyers are looking for and which decision-makers should be reached first can help improve your company’s lead gen capabilities.Strong lead generation methods will help you identify qualified prospects and close new business, keeping you steps ahead of your competition.

Strategies to Increase Lead Generation

There are many effective tools that B2B tech companies can harness when looking to increase lead generation. By utilizing these strategies, your company can raise its profile among key audiences and target markets, while at the same time driving new leads to your brand.

Three lead generation tactics for your company to consider are:

Blogging and Social Media Campaigns – Blogging and social media are effective methods for lead generation in the B2B tech space. However, it’s not simply about creating blog posts and then posting or tweeting the link. To produce actual results, your blogging and social media efforts should employ a strategic element. An advantage to blogging and using social channels is that your target audience is already engaged on these sites. You don’t have to work to generate interest; rather, you can engage these users and enter the conversation. Combining this strategy with compelling blog posts and social media content can drive site traffic and increase lead generation.

Infographics and Data-Driven Campaigns – If you want more lead generation, you’ll need more data. Studies are a great way for your brand to establish itself as an authority in your industry and increase your thought leadership profile. Steps for a successful data-driven campaign include:

• Develop a survey that tailors to and captivates a particular audience.
• Analyze the findings and determine which results would make for the most compelling and newsworthy angle.
• Design accompanying visuals, like infographics and white papers that highlight your study’s key discoveries.

If you properly engineer your data-driven campaign, you stand a high likelihood of driving traffic to your website, prompting prospective clients to download white papers, request more information or take some other action that increases lead generation.

Case Studies – Case studies remain an important part of reaching out to your audience. Including past success stories and customer testimonials encourages prospects to consider your company for its products or services. The information from your data studies and infographics will supplement the information highlighted. The great thing about case studies is that since they are usually hosted on your website, those reading them are often already potential leads.

Lead Generation Services – Start with a Consulting Firm’s Needs Assessment Questionnaire

As a lead b2b gen agency, there’s a ton of background information that we need to gather before we can write a proposal for you.

That’s because until we’re sure what’s broken, we can’t tell you what needs to be fixed. In fact, I’d argue that any marketing agency that specializes in lead generation that writes you a proposal without asking these questions will probably not get you the results you want. When it comes to lead gen improvement, everybody’s needs are different and cookie-cutter proposals don’t cut it.

So, cutting to the chase, here’s a list of questions our lead generation consultants at Walker Sands Digital will typically ask during an initial call with a prospective client.

In some cases, we will send these questions in advance, and in other cases we will just reference them during the call. Feel free to use them for your own purposes, and if you have any suggestions on how to improve these questions, I’d love to hear them.

Sample Lead Generation Needs Assessment Phone Call Agenda

Call Objective

We have an approach to lead generation that is very effective. There are many components to effective lead generation and it requires a holistic, connected strategy. During this call, our intention is to get a better understanding of your business and identify gaps in your marketing engine that need to be shored up. Subsequent to the call, we will put together a proposal to help you fill identified gaps and move to a much more productive lead gen system.

Questions We Will Cover In the Call

1. Give us your elevator speech. We’ve spent some time getting up to speed on your business but it always helps to hear it directly from you.
   
   
2. How good do you feel your top-level messaging is for your offerings? When people who talk to you, visit your website, or read your collateral materials, do they walk away understanding what you do and how you can help them? How has your messaging evolved over time? [NOTE: This is important because if messaging is weak and/or disjointed, it is very difficult to generate leads.].
   
   
3. What are the audiences you are trying to reach? How have you segmented prospects? Which audiences are most important to your business plan? [NOTE: This is important because your lead gen program must cater to the individual needs of distinct audiences. “One size fits all” marketing is usually not very effective.].
   
   
4. What causes a buyer to be interested in your offering? Have you developed buyer personas? What pain points are you solving for each of your audiences? How are you solving them? [NOTE: This is important because triggers and pain points motivate purchase. All of the content you create for marketing should hinge on triggers, pain points and the benefits of working with you, i.e how you can eliminate the pain.].
   
   
5. What objections do you typically hear from prospects? Do any prospects view you as a commodity offering? [NOTE: This is important because we want to make sure that your lead gen program addresses any possible objections early, to make sure you are not losing prospect opportunities before they engage with you. If you are viewed as a commodity, we have other strategies to employ.].
   
   
6. Who are your main competitors? How do you stack up against them? From a business perspective? From a marketing perspective? How are you beating them and why might you lose out on an opportunity to a competitor? What are they doing they you admire? [NOTE: This is important because your lead gen strategy needs to reflect competitor activity and positioning.].
   
   
7. How do you get most of your leads now? From a lead gen perspective, what’s not happening that you want to start happening in the future? Is the issue that you are not getting enough exposure to get leads? Is it that you have plenty of interactions with people but they are not moving along in your sales/marketing pipeline? Is it that you get leads but they are not good leads? [NOTE: For us to be effective, we need to get beyond “I need more leads” and get more granular on root cause.].
   
   
8. How is your marketing department organized? Who leads marketing for your company? Relative to your company’s other strengths (e.g. product development), how do you rank your marketing? [NOTE: For us to determine how we can help, we need to know your in-house marketing capabilities.].
   
   
9. How is Sales organized? [NOTE: If you sell through a channel, our lead gen program will be very different as compared to a program we would create for a client that sells direct.].
   
   
10. Do you have prior or current experience working with marketing agencies? — please describe.
    
    
11. Are you executing against a set marketing plan and budget or do you tend to invest in marketing activities on the fly? What is a customer worth to you and how much are you willing to spend to acquire a customer? A lead?
    
    
12. How many structured marketing experiments (i.e. pilot programs) do you run per year? — please provide a few recent examples.
    
    
13. What are you currently doing for marketing in the following areas? [NOTE: This inventory of your marketing initiatives gives us a baseline to see whether you are missing out on any key elements that could improve your lead gen yields.].
    
    
    • PR (Do you have a PR agency or a full-time in-house PR resource? Is there anything you feel is particularly newsworthy or notable about what you do that should warrant more attention from the media? How often are you putting out press releases? How many media placements did you get in the past 12 months? How many speaking opportunities? How do you use your PR placements to support lead gen? Relative to other marketing tactics, how important do you feel PR is to helping you achieve your business objectives?)
      
      
    • Web Presence (When did you last redesign your website? Who built the site? How satisfied are you with its current state? Does it reflect your current business model and priorities or is it out of date? What metrics do you track to determine how well your site is doing in terms of advancing your business objectives? How often do you update it? Is it easy to update? Do you feel you have compelling content and calls to action that contribute to lead gen?)
      
      
    • Content creation (What content marketing assets have you created and deployed in recent months — e.g. webinars, white papers, guides, articles, statistics, infographics, etc.? How do you promote your content? What content do you have on your website that is specifically built for conversion? What content seems to resonate most with prospects? Is your content focused exclusively on your offerings or do you create content that is more broadly designed to educate the market and build rapport with them? If you feel you are not creating enough marketing content, what are the main reasons?)
      
      
    • SEO (Do you have an SEO agency or dedicated inhouse SEO resource? Do you have an SEO strategy/program that you are executing against? Are you and your team familiar with SEO best practices? What keyword research have you done to date? Does your SEO program cater to all stages of the marketing funnel? How do you feel you are doing on SEO — do you rank well and get traffic for phrases that a prospect is likely to type in to Google’s search engine? How many leads per month do you get from SEO?)
      
      
    • PPC and Remarketing (Tell us about your PPC marketing programs. Have you invested in PPC and do you have an active program in place now? If so, who manages it? How much are you spending per month? What’s a typical cost per action for you, e.g. the cost to get somebody to fill out a lead form? How many leads are you getting from PPC advertising? Are you investing in remarketing, i.e. showing ads to people after they leave your site? If yes, how have you segmented remarketing lists and what results are you getting?)
      
      
    • Lead Nurturing / Email Marketing (Do you capture every inbound lead into a CRM or marketing automation system of some sort? If so, is this done automatically or manually? For example, if a lead fills out a web form, does this automatically go into your CRM system? Which backend CRM systems or marketing automation solutions do you use and how well do you think you are using them? Do you regularly and systematically reach out to contacts via email, either informally or formally with a regular newsletter? How effective is that outreach? What metrics do you track for these programs? How would you assess your efforts in this area?)
      
      
    • Social (What is your strategy with respect to social media marketing? How are you using social platforms like LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and Twitter to facilitate lead gen? Do you have an active program to build followers and engage with them in a way that helps to generate more qualified leads?)
    • Outbound Direct Marketing to Prospects (Do you have or buy lists of prospects and proactively reach out to them to get them interested in becoming a customer? Please elaborate on how you approach outbound direct marketing. What content assets or offers are you using to get their attention?)
      
      
    • Other (What else are you doing from a marketing perspective? Events or tradeshows? Print ads? Co-marketing with other companies? Is there anything you would like to have tried but have not yet had a chance to test it? )
      
      
14. Of all the marketing strategies and tactics mentioned above, what do you think your prospects respond to best? Where do you think you need to improve?
    
    
15. Last question: With respect to helping you with lead generation, is there any additional information that would be important for us to know about?

Yes, it’s a boatload of questions. But working through these questions allows a company to determine whether it is embracing an integrated, holistic approach to lead generation that taps into the power of the entire digital marketing ecosystem. After walking through these items with a prospective client, we can put together a smart marketing program that, based on our experiences to date, results in a substantial increase in quality lead generation that drives revenues to a new level.

Walker Sands: Proven B2B Lead Generation

At Walker Sands, lead generation for our B2B tech clients is a core component of the public relations and marketing strategies we develop. Our Chicago office helps to guide company growth through B2B lead generation. Using involved and practical strategies, we highlight your company’s strengths and match them to the most promising leads.

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