A Guide to Lead Generation

What is a Lead?

Businesses find prospects through two primary methods:

Purchasing Data: They buy databases with contact information and contact details about a person who may or may not be a relevant prospect for the company. These prospects are contacted by the cold callers to open communication and confirm if they qualify as a lead.

Generating Leads: These are people who initiate contact with the company by submitting their personal information or directly communicating via contact form or helpline using effective lead generation strategies.

This should explain that a lead is a person who initiates contact with an organization by expressing their interest in the company’s products or services in a viable form.

Leads are approached by a company after the initiation of communication by the lead themself, rather than being reached out randomly as a cold-call prospect.

How do Leads Initiate Contact?

Say, for instance, you are researching “Efficient team management” for an office presentation. You find an interesting eBook on a website and try to download it. A pop-up appears, asking you to fill in your name, email address, company name, etc for downloading the document. You fill it in and submit it- you are now a lead.

The information provided by you on the website is an indication that you’re interested in the topic and might consider associating with the company.

This is one of the many methods of initiating contact and there are more. But not all leads are equal or have the same process.

Here are the primary types of leads and their method of contact:

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): Interact with marketing efforts such as filling their details on a landing page to avail of an offer.
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQL): Someone who has expressed a clear interest in buying a product or service. This may be through filling in a survey form or inquiries.
• Product Qualified Leads (PQL): These people have used your product on trial or limited version and have expressed interest in purchasing the paid or extended version.
• Service Qualified Leads: These leads express interest in upgrading their subscription to a service that they’re currently using.

What is Lead Generation?

Now that we know what are leads and how they initiate contact, the question remains- how do you generate leads at will? Are there any tricks to generate more leads?

Yes, there are!

In the simplest terms, lead generation is the process of attracting relevant people to your product or service and increasing their interest to the point that they convert into customers or clients.

The conversion happens through nurturing the lead. That’s the tricky part but works like butter if you crack the code. There are some basic tools that businesses use for lead nurturing:

• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Ads and Retargeting
• Social Media Marketing
• Product Trials
• Referral Marketing

Do You Really Need Lead Generation?

Umm… yes.

You could buy a database but that would waste a lot of your time and resources. For example, if your sales team dedicates 8 hours of their shift in cold calling from this database, they most likely get negative responses more than conversions. Moreover, repeated negative responses can demotivate the callers and decrease their quality of work eventually.

On the other hand, people who willingly show interest in your business and then contacted by your sales team have a greater probability of converting into leads, showing a rather natural transition.

Organic prospect lead generation are more instinctive and easier to nurture. As the second stage of inbound marketing method, sales generation happens after attracting an audience. The next step is nurturing and then to a happy customer.

Evidently, without lead generation, you can’t really proceed with conversion and close the sale without getting turned down incessantly. And that’s exactly why lead generation is a crucial and integral part for any business.

Simplify Lead Generation

Have you heard of lead generation automation?

“80% of marketers think marketing automation generates more leads” - APSIS International

That’s how mind-blowing this innovation is and you need to jump on this bandwagon to boost your lead generation process exponentially.

Finder, a lead generation tool, has world’s largest lead database with high-quality B2B leads available at your fingertips. You can simplify the process further with CRM integrations and screen leads from its database according to your persona. It not only provides you with the name and contact information of the leads, it also includes the email address, LinkedIn profile and even contact potential clients.

All these features can save big bucks and generate greater volume as well as better quality of leads, making the whole process so much simpler.