What is B2B Lead Generation?

B2B lead generation is the process followed by outsourcing companies, software developers, marketing and advertising agencies, auto manufacturers, chemical plants, etc. to identify and attract potential customers. B2B sales and marketing teams adopt different lead generation strategies like referral marketing, free trial and social media marketing to connect with the target audience and cater to their demand.

How to Generate Leads for B2B 

1. Meaningful conversations: Building relationships is essential to making high sales. So next time a client or customer asks you about your business, instead of sending just a link, connect through video and phone calls and provide them with a complete summary of what you do.

2. Targeted list of business contacts: B2B lead generation software offers a vast database of companies which can be interested in your offerings. Using this database, you can create a list of targeted leads based on location, industry, revenue and company size.

3. Cold emails: B2B lead gen software offers the merge tags option wherein you can personalize the content of each cold email that you send to your prospective lead. Personalized cold emails have higher chances of getting client responses.

4. Marketing automation: Lead management solutions provide marketing automation tools to help with customer segmentation and converting the leads into SQL or sales qualified leads.

5. Warm calls: Warm calls are for such leads which are already aware about your business. You can engage in warm calls to initiate meaningful conversation and understand their business requirements.

6. Embedded promotion: Automated lead generation software helps in embedding promotional links to your email signature, which takes B2B prospects to a landing page.

7. Connect on social media: Social media is a powerful medium for engaging conversations and marketing promotion. Connect with as many leads as possible by joining the right social media groups and start marketing your business.

8. Website traffic: Make sure that you are adding to your promotional campaigns and web pages the right keywords. B2B lead generation tools let you find out high search volume keywords for improving the website's traffic. The better the traffic, the higher are the chances of attracting b2 Bleads.

What is the B2B Lead Generation Process

Acquire or attract leads by sharing content across multiple marketing channels. This content can be in the form of infographics, white papers, blog posts and more that can be shared on social media channels.

Further, lead scoring gives an understanding about prospects who are likely to become your customer. Profiling such leads is important for B2B lead generation process as you get a clear view of their purchasing power. You can give score to B2B lead based on attributes like budget, timeline, company size, services required, etc.

B2B Lead Generation Strategies for Software Companies

1. Interactive landing pages: Develop an optimized and well-designed landing page to attract the right B2B leads. An engaging landing page offers a better browsing experience. You can create an attractive landing page for B2B lead generation by: 

• Addressing problems of the target audience
• Writing compelling headlines
• Keeping the content focussed and crisp
• Persuasive CTA
• Adding an FAQ section
• Designing social proofs and short forms
• Attractive colours

2. Organizing webinars: Webinars are informative sources for connecting with potential customers. Statistics also suggest how almost half of those who register for these webinars always turn up. Through such webinars, you can showcase your expertise while at the same time help clients resolve their issues.

3. Free trials: This is one of the most effective B2B lead generation strategies used by software companies to generate more leads. Everybody likes free runs and such trials allow customers a hands-on experience regarding your services or product.

4. Influencer marketing: This is an important strategy to increase the reach of your offerings and build trust among your target users. Once your product's credibility is established, you are bound to generate more B2B leads.

5. Referral programs: Referral program is based on the strategy where your existing customers promote your offerings among their friends or families to generate their interest. Referral programs remain to be one of the most important B2B lead generation strategies for software companies.

6. Survey forms: Survey form is a great value addition to your business because it gives you the first-hand information regarding:

• How well your product could meet customer's expectations?
• Did our service or product solve your problem?
• Would you recommend our services/products to your friends and family?
• What did you most like or not like about our service or product?
• How has your experience been with us and what ratings you would provide?

Survey is an important B2B lead generation strategy because customers give you their contact details, which you can use for lead profiling.

What is Lead Generation Software

Lead generation software is an enterprise technology that helps generate, qualify and categorize leads for nurturing and conversion. Leads can be generated from multiple channels like social media pages, emails, etc.

Lead generation software provides a range of features for identifying the most appropriate lead generation strategy to track your potential customers. The software is deployed for collecting leads from specified channels and routing them to sales and marketing teams.

What is B2B Lead Generation Software

B2B lead generation tools help identify prospects for your products and services. Based on demographic, psychographic and technographic filters, B2B lead generation software qualifies and nurtures your potential customers. B2B lead generation systems also help identify lead triggers like customization requirement to help your sales team close deals faster.

How to Use B2B Lead Generation Tools

• B2B lead generation software provides various tools for making the lead capturing & nurturing process a breeze for you.
• Embedding landing pages in your email communication to create a marketing stack
• Live chat and signup forms for connecting with website visitors
• Sales navigator that provides lead recommendations and their account details
• Scheduler for setting up client meet ups so that you can connect with the targeted leads without any delay.

Features & Capabilities of B2B Lead Generation Software

1. Website visitor identification: B2B lead generation software tracks your website visitors and helps in following up with them even if they have not filled any form or signed up on your website.

2. Lead data collection: Leads from all marketing channels are tracked, be it social media, website forms or emails. These leads are further categorized based on certain parameters like company size, industry, scope of customization, etc.

3. Email marketing: B2B lead gen tools help run email marketing campaigns and create the workflow for follow ups with personalized greetings

4. Landing page creation: Pre-set templates with B2B lead gen software helps create customized landing pages as per your campaign and the target audience.

5. Sales process automation: B2B lead gen solutions helps the salesforce in automating day-to-day tasks like follow ups with prospects. The software shares automated reminders for following up with any lead. Also, it helps in creating the SMS and email workflow for automated yet real-time interaction with prospects.

6. Live chat: B2B lead generation tools can be integrated with live chat technology to track any visitor’s intent and to route their query to the most suitable agent.

7. Social media marketing: B2B lead gen software can be integrated with different social media channels to track any brand-related activity and notify your marketing team about the same.

8. Customer insights: The software provides insights about the demography and technography of different prospects. Accordingly, you can frame your marketing communication.

Benefits of Using B2B Lead Generation Tools

1. Targeting the ideal audience: B2B lead generation tools make it easy to conduct campaigns for lead generation and reaching the targeted audience.

2. Growing your followers: B2B lead generation tools can be used to craft quality content and start conversation with potential and existing customers to increase a brand's following.

3. Gathering customer reviews: B2B lead gen software can be used for collecting customer testimonials and reviews for marketing collaterals and convincing the prospective leads about a product's or service's performance.

4. Boosting revenue: As leads get converted into sales with the help of the software, your business's revenue outcome receives a boost.

5. Analysing website traffic: Lead generation software makes it easy to analyse website traffic so that more leads can be turned into profitable buyers.

6. Improving sales productivity: Automated lead generation software automates repetitive manual tasks like data entry so that the sales team can focus on more value-added activities.

7. Lead analytics: B2B lead generation tools provide lead analytics to refine your marketing strategies as well as check those channels that are best for lead generation.