5 Great Ways to Improve Lead Generation and Sales

Generating leads and making sales go hand in hand.

The more high-quality leads you can generate the higher your chances of nurturing and closing the deal.

Well, that’s mostly easier said than done considering today’s competitive B2B environment, limited budgetary allocation, and tough KPIs.

One thing is certain, you need digital marketing strategies that raise your voice above the din. And not just raise your voice, but also attract potential customers and convince them to partner with you.

With this in mind, we have lined up five tactics that may help improve lead generation and get those sales numbers up.

• Work With Data

If competition and a limited budget are tough, inaccurate and insufficient useful data is a far greater headache.

It doesn’t matter how great your sales and marketing teams are, if your data is inaccurate or decayed, their efforts will take a hit. Because they will waste time dialing wrong numbers or emailing outdated accounts rather than sell to qualified leads.

But it’s not sales and marketing that are affected, customer experiences suffer as well minimizing retention and upselling/cross-selling opportunities.

A data-driven strategy becomes a necessary tool for researching and reaching target audiences in order to nurture them properly and lead them to conversion.

Here are some benefits of incorporating data analytics into your strategy:

• Helps you generate more leads. Analyzing data can help you identify the marketing channels (email marketing campaigns, PPC, social media, etc) that provide the best leads. You can then prioritize resources on these channels.
• You gain a better understanding of audience behavior. You can get vital clues about visitor behavior on your site. This includes how they interact with products/services and the time they spend on them. With these insights, you can gauge their interests and points where they get stuck, then act accordingly.
• Helps you identify opportunities. By analyzing underserved customers, you can find cross-selling opportunities and tailor micro-campaigns around them. This may help boost revenues and improve customer lifetime value.

• Incorporate Conversion Marketing

Here is a sobering statistic for you.

A study showed that up to 79 percent of marketing leads don’t create sales opportunities. 

What happens to these leads?

Many aren’t nurtured to convert, so they decay in your system. 

Conversion marketing tactics that you can employ to minimize this percentage include:

• Create content that grabs attention and convinces audiences to engage with you. Identify the questions your target market is asking and compile factual content that answers these questions. Unique content commands authority and increases audience trust in your company.
• Create video. Branded videos, webinars, product demos, and testimonials are excellent formats that boost visibility, establish trust, and encourage engagement. Remember to embed videos in your emails to increase open rates. 
• Create urgency. Leverage fear of missing out in a non-aggressive way to motivate audiences to take action. Tactics like “last chance” or “limited time offer,” limited free shipping for products, or a countdown clock can compel audiences to move quicker.

• Make Cold Calls

Why are some salespeople more successful than others?

Is there a secret to cold calling that the rest of us don’t know about? 

The tactic has evolved with salespeople no longer calling random numbers, rather, engaging brands that can benefit from the partnership.

But what about the callers? The sales reps? Have they evolved?

Turns out the successful ones have, and here are some traits they possess.

• They are coachable. A coachable rep is bound to become a successful one. Identify cold-calling experts within your organization and without, that you can learn from. Analyze the calls you make to pinpoint areas you can do better, and continue to improve your skill.
• They practice daily. Cold calling is a skill that gets better with practice. Do mock calls and practice with prospects to improve yourself.
• They don’t overthink the call. There are many ways a call can turn out. Thinking about all the outcomes can make anyone freeze. Keep a calling guide handy, tap into your knowledge, and use your intuition to make the conversation genuine.
• They are active listeners. Active listening goes beyond what the prospect is saying. It helps you pick up their tone, emotions, and inflections so you can respond in kind.

• Leverage Social Proof

Often, people look for reviews and other forms of credibility before committing to buy a product/service. It’s a phenomenon where a brand’s credibility is validated through the opinions of its current or former customers. 

As a marketer, one of the quickest ways to convince prospects of your capability is by providing the social proof they need to reach decisions. 

Here are ways to leverage this strategy:

• Encourage customers to leave reviews. Customers share their experiences in ways that other customers can relate to. They may highlight the problem they faced and how your solutions improved the situation. Positive reviews are a powerful way to generate leads and increase sales.
• Create a customers’ stories page on your website. Proof sells, the promises you make don’t. Boost your reputation by creating a page where customers can share video or written testimonials and visitors can explore. It will help build trust in your solutions.
• Display credentials and awards. Proudly display the awards or credentials you’ve received from credible third-party organizations with short descriptions of why you were awarded. While you are it, display customer logos of brands you work with to convince potential customers to jump in—just be sure to ask permission first.

• Use Email Marketing

While the end goal of email marketing is making sales, priority lies in building relationships with potential customers who ultimately convert into customers.

This means your emails should have well-defined goals that work towards building trust and nurturing relationships.

Here are some tips that may help you derive the most value from this tactic:

• Make your subject lines engaging. Subject lines encourage email receivers to open them and read the contents inside, so you want to make yours catchy. Use verbs and adjectives that influence people to open the email.
• Segment your list. Divide your email subscriber list into different groups based on behavior, interests, and needs. You can then create content and irresistible offers to pique their interest.
• Create landing pages that correlate with your email campaigns. Your landing page should match the theme and headlines of your emails and provide more information about what you want them to do. It’s more effective than having them navigate your entire website in search of it.
• Automate the emailing process in line with customer or prospects’ interactions with your brand. From welcome emails to thank you and cart abandonment emails, you can set triggers that send the right emails to different groups to encourage engagement and loyalty.