What CEOs Need to Know About Lead Generation

Lead generation is used in every business. Whether you see a lead as a potential sale or a much larger contract agreement, leads are the lifeblood of businesses.

Without leads that convert into sales, businesses would fail. But so often this crucial aspect of a business isn’t given the time and attention it deserves. Whether this is by broadening the top of the sales funnel scope, investing in specialist sales development outsourcing teams or identifying core funnel gaps, there’s so many aspects to lead generation that are often missed.

What do CEOs need to consider when it comes to lead gen?

Lead generation isn’t just about getting more contacts into your funnel, it’s about how you nurture them and move them down the pipeline before closing a sale.

Each individual aspect and step in the overall process of lead generation, from initial enquiry to nurturing them down the funnel, are equally as important, and one without the other makes it difficult to succeed to the highest level. This is often overlooked by many CEOs who will push for more contacts to be made, without considering how to entice leads to buy or convert. Having lots of contacts is great, but without knowing how to take them from just interested leads to potential sales is a trick often neglected.

This doesn’t just take time, it takes knowledge, personable sales reps, data, understanding of the buyers’ process and so much more. Lead generation and conversion is an art and a science.

Lead generation is not just as simple as getting a higher number of leads. Leads need to be attracted in the right sort of ways that allow for the full value to be extracted from each one.

How CEOs can improve their lead gen strategy

1. Investigate new channels

The days of door-to-door selling are long gone and the method by which leads are captured can now take many forms with many available avenues to explore. This could be something like paid social media advertising, or something more traditional like outbound phone calls. It’s about finding the best options for your business and trying something new.

For example, if you’ve never tried to reach an audience using organic Facebook or LinkedIn posts before, what’s the harm in giving it a go? It’s a new potential channel that your leads could be using, and you will be engaging with your audience in a new way. With so many channels, it’s important you dedicate the proper time to each and every one to get the maximum value. It’s worth saying that you’re going to get the most of your new channel with the help of a specialist, so working with an external agency is probably wise.

2. Use data to the maximum

Data is the new oil, and with the right data and analysis, you can make business critical decisions with ease.

It’s not just about the data of your existing database, it’s also about considering your lead data. Finding the answer to questions such as what were the key sticking points for every lost opportunity that you had, and how can you prevent those sticking points from happening? It’s no longer about guess work, or the spray and pray approach, we have the data now and it’s time to start using it.

3. Identify your customers – now

Customer identification and brand personas are no longer some creative ideations informed by guesswork, instead they’re data informed profiles that build more targeted lead acquisition campaigns.

It’s important that the time spent identifying the current customer and your ideal customer aren’t wasted. These data driven profiles will hyper focus your sales development teams on what is important, ensuring the pure focus is on the leads that are wanted, rather than those that aren’t serviceable or don’t meet the company goals.

What good lead generation looks like

Lead generation isn’t a one size fits all solution. Each company needs a different approach that needs to be truly tailored to the company at hand.

Inside global, a B2B sales outsourcing company were working with Silver Peak, who deliver Wide Area Network (WAN) solutions consisting of SD WAN, WAN Optimisation and SASE. The goal was to expand across Europe and the UK, and inside global used a multi-channel approach, alongside their native SDR team across UK, France and DACH.

And the results? 60% of total pipeline influenced by inside global and the largest single contributor to Silver Peak’s Net New pipeline at 45%. The ROI (Return on Investment) seen across the world was a huge success for Silver Peak, with Germany seeing a 6050%, France an incredible 16,294% and the UK seeing a 5981% ROI. Overall, the ROI for the initial Silver Peak campaign was 8565%, making it a huge success for everyone involved.