Marketing and sales activity that does not optimise your B2B lead generation is a wasted opportunity.
You should use your brand building marketing, and your sales activation campaigns, in a coordinated way. This will generate new clients and increase the revenue growth of your agency.
Too often, agencies do one without the other. As a result they don't generate the new business opportunities that they expect. Brand building alone will not generate a sufficiently robust pipeline of new business opportunities. Sales activation without the foundation of brand building is a fruitless task. B2B lead generation requires both.
We have developed a marketing and sales lead generation funnel to help you drive revenue.
The Brand Building Part of the Funnel
Creating Awareness
To most effectively generate qualified leads for your agency, you first need to define your ideal potential customer.
You can then do brand building to make them aware of your brand and the business problem you address. Your social media presence, your advertising, your SEO optimised website, your speaking at a virtual event all contribute. As a result you make your ideal prospect client aware of your agency and how you can help them.
Once your prospect lead is aware of your brand, you then have to communicate with them directly. This is the nurture stage of your marketing and sales activity. You build trust and engagement with your prospect clients, so they become qualified leads. You can use webinars, white-papers, virtual events etc. to record contact information (name, job title, company, and email address). And then you use your CRM system to share content (newsletters, email, podcasts) and thus nurture and develop the relationship.
The Sales Activation Part of the Funnel
Remember, in B2B marketing and sales, at any one time, assume that only 10% of your potential leads will be in a position to buy.
The final stage of the funnel is to convert these nurtured leads so that they become qualified leads - i.e. they are the clients who are actually in the purchase process for your agency's products and services. This can be done in a number of ways (Google Ads, tele-sales, DIY lead generation) using the contact information you have already gathered, or where you have secured it from other channels.
The important issue is to recognise that sales activation is far more effective if you have already done the brand building.
Moreover, when you are doing your sales activation, it is OK if some of the people you contact are not in a position to purchase at that time. They go back into your funnel at the earlier nurture stage, so that they are more likely to include you in a pitch process, when the time is right for them.
Optimising your Own Marketing & Sales Activity to increase Lead Generation
We hope our lead generation funnel is helpful in framing and executing your marketing and sales activity. We know from experience that it works.
If you have any questions about it, or need any help in putting this framework into action, then get in touch... Contact