Lead Generation – Dutch Uncles

How Does a New Business Get Its First Client?

Tanisha Achrekar — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 08:35:04 +0000

Establishing your business from the scratch is a thrilling and overwhelming experience. Getting your product or service ready for the market is only half the battle. Finding clients or customers who are willing to give your product or service a try can sometimes be a real struggle. Even with the best of products and services, clients do not magically appear. Below are some ways a new business will be able to get its first client.

Four techniques to get your first client

Use your network to your advantage

The first place to look for to get your client is by tapping on your existing network. Be it the business community you are a part of or your friends or even friends of friends. Talk about your product or service and learn about their views on it. Don’t play too aggressive and try to make a sale in the initial stage of your business. Focus on learning rather than selling, you don’t want to seem too desperate. If your product or service naturally catches their attention, they are bound to be your first client in no time. Also, your circle is a great place to practice your pitch. Many times small business owners find inventors in their circle through effortless pitching.

Create an online presence

The Internet connects billions of people on various platforms. Look for the place on the Internet where your business belongs. Several online communities and platforms are supporting small businesses and looking for new products or services. In these online platforms, you will find business advice, clients, inventors and overall build a stronger network.

Also, another online strategy to get people in is blogging. Blogs provide significant results in the long run. Build your blog around your product/service and if possible launch it before you launch your product/service. A blog is a great way to tell the story of your product and generate demand. As your blog will create enough traffic beforehand and as it is related to what you are selling, you may find your first customer in that traffic itself. Also, crafting content is a great way to boost your Google ranking.

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The first place to look for to get your client is by tapping on your existing network.

Use affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a powerful tool for getting more users. The best part of it is that this is a low-risk way but the rewards are often great. In affiliate marketing, you do not pay for the traffic driven to your website but only for the actual conversions. Dozens of times the products marketed by the affiliate are bought by the customers. An affiliate works on a commission that it gets for bringing in consumers.

Consider providing free product/service

Just started a business, and give out free stuff? It might seem a lot to ask for but people love free products or services. When the goal of your business is to be heard as much as possible and get your product out there, giving out free stuff is worth a try. If you are confident that after using your product or service, people will come back for more, giving free products or trials is worth a shot. Create a strategy on how you will provide free products/services to your targeted audience. If it seems financially too burdening you can offer a first-time discount to your customers. Psychologically free or discounted products appeal to the human brain and you might end up getting not only your first customer but many more along the way.

Be prepared and have faith in your business. As long as you put in the work, you will get your first client. Embrace and learn from the failures that come along the way. Giving up is not an option here, experiment with the above techniques and see which one works the best for your business.

The post How Does a New Business Get Its First Client? appeared first on Dutch Uncles.

Lead Generation: An Art of Converting Curiosity into Sales

Tanisha Achrekar — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 03:47:54 +0000

Whether you have a newly established business or a successful one since generations, you will be constantly working on expanding your customer base. It is difficult for any business to grow and expand without new customers. One of the best ways of growing your business is accessing sales leads to get more customers. Read on to know more about leads generation –

What is a lead?

A lead constitutes anyone who has shown an interest in the product or service that you are selling. It can be a person, group of people or even a company. If you are a B2B business your targeted customers may be other organisations or sole proprietors whereas, if you are a B2C company, your target audience are likely to be individuals. Leads can be broadly classified in two ways:

Inbound leads

Generating inbound leads is a slow and organic process. The word-of-mouth reviews we give to our friends of a product/service is an example of inbound lead. With time, the inbound lead has become quite modern and upgraded. The posters and flyers made by designers and hosting exhibitions to communicate to a vast group of potential customers are all inbound leads. Even the popular referral and loyalty programs on various websites are a form of inbound lead.

Outbound leads

The notifications of offers and sales you get on your smartphone by Myntra, Amazon and such e-commerce sites are an example of outbound leads. It is an approach where leads are initiated to potential customers. The consumers here are contacted even though they have not voluntarily asked for it or showed any interest in a product/service. Outbound leads is a traditional approach compared to inbound leads. Back in the days, those telemarketing phone calls were also a way of generating outbound leads.

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Sales is not about selling anymore, but about building trust and educating.

- Siva Devaki

What does lead generation mean?

Lead generation is simply finding ways to get more customers. It is all about attracting potential customers to increase the sales of your organisation. Lead generation is an integral part of the sales process of any company. The intention of it is to gain the customer’s attention and their contact information to eventually make a potential sale. An independent survey conducted by Prospex.ai in the UK found that more than 58 percent of businesses face challenges in lead generation.

Lead generation earlier was limited to people selling door-to-door, conducting exhibitions or calling landlines. With the advent of digitalisation, lead generation has also witnessed an evolution. There are tons of digital channels used to general leads now. The Internet has made it possible to create effective leads using more specific information. Earlier, it was unsaid practice for sales representatives to educate potential buyers on their product/service. Nowadays all consumers have abundant information available on their fingertip immediately. A Google search or a YouTube video is enough for a buyer to know about a product/service these days. From traditional sales pitches, most companies are focused now on generating a strong internet presence.

What are the steps towards lead generation?

It is vital for your sales team to know how to go about generating leads. There are three primary phases involved in lead generation in the form of a funnel.

Awareness and discovery

On the top of the funnel is the first phase – awareness and discovery. The prospective consumers here have just got to know about the product/service. As a sales representative, it is important to create a long-lasting impression while introducing your product.

Interest and engagement

After the first phase, the second phase will be narrow as it will be focused on creating interest and engagement. Here you need to stand apart from the competition, to gain the consumer’s attention.

Decide, Buy and Adopt

This is the last phase of the lead generation funnel. The consumer is already interested in your product and well-informed about it. Now it is all about winning them and compelling them to buy your product/service. Use your USP to your advantage by encouraging the customer to make a purchase.

Why is lead generation so important?

The obvious reason why generating leads is important is to gain customers. These customers in turn increase the sales and profit of your company. Apart from these obvious ones, several other key benefits of lead generation include:

Creates brand awareness

One of the ways leads are generated is by creating blog posts, social media engagements and several other advertisements. It does generate leads but it also builds brand awareness. Your advertisement and promotions directly create an image of how people view your company.

Targeted nurturing

When you are generating leads the initiatives that you take also help in nurturing them. For example, a person downloads your brochure and after reading through it is keen to buy your product or opt for your service. In such cases, you have successfully managed to generate and nurture your lead simultaneously.

Product enhancement

When you are generating leads, you will have customer interactions. This will give you data regarding what is working for your products/services. You can use this information to enhance your product.

Competitive analysis

Lead generation activities do include conducting competitive analysis. This analysis helps in understanding how competitors are attracting customers. The strategies that they are conducting, the language they are using and their outbound and inbound activities. Along with generating leads here, you get a competitive analysis also.

How to create a successful lead generation process?

Generating a stream of leads is vital for any business to prosper and grow in the long run. There are several ways to go about in creating successful leads. Below are some tips that will help you while creating them –

Pick your target audience

Knowing who your target audience establishes the base of your lead. To successfully reach your customer and sell your products, you first need to know who your target audience is. Conduct research and gather data to find who you want to sell your product/service to.

Use Social Media to Connect and Engage

We live in a world where everything it’s all about “graming it.” Whether it is people’s political views or the vacation they took everything is available on their social media. Social media is a great tool for connecting with your target audiences. Along with promotions like giveaways, you can also conduct polls on your different products and get their views. Get on with your marketing team and figure out ways to use social media effectively.

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How you sell is more important than what you sell.

- Andy Paul

Use Email newsletters to your advantage

After getting in contact with a potential customer, the next step is to contact them to turn the lead into sales. A consistent and not so in the face way to do so is through email newsletters. It is a consistent way of communicating with your prospects without bothering them.

Choose promotional methods wisely

A promotional plan is needed for generating leads to get your products and services in front of your potential customers. There are several ways to target your audience to promote your business. Rather than indulging in all of it at once, be selective with the methods you choose to apply.

Stand out of the crowd

If you shop online, you may be aware of the typical emails that you receive constantly from e-commerce sites. You know they are those typical ones and you may not bother to even open them. However, if you receive an email that has a compelling subject and seems personalized rather than just a system-generated one, you are bound to be curious about it. Find ways to make your leads stand out from the rest of the typical one to win the attention of your targeted audiences.

Conduct research

Conducting research is a must before generating any leads. Do your homework about your customers, your industry, your products, your competitors, and the current challenges that exist. It will make creating leads a lot easier when you know what is happening in your industry.

Use sales signals

Converting leads into sales takes weeks and even months in some cases. Use sales signals like calling, sending out emails, creating demos, and other ways of communicating with potential customers. Also, sales signals will help you in understanding the potential your current lead holds. The potential customer’s next action will help you in knowing where exactly is your lead in the process.

Lead generation is an efficient system and a long-term continual process. Generating successful leads will make the rest of the sales process quite smooth and productive. Set up a well-streamlined process of lead generation and you will see an increase in your business growth. Also, read our article on ‘sales pitch’ to further enhance your sales and profits.

The post Lead Generation: An Art of Converting Curiosity into Sales appeared first on Dutch Uncles.

First Step to Generate Leads: Key Perspectives You Can’t Miss

Avijit Dutta — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 09:19:54 +0000

The Demand Generation Context

Lead generation is a process, a set of activities required to fill the top of a marketing funnel. It is the process through which a ‘suspect’ is converted into a ‘prospect’. By definition, a suspect is a person or an entity who is outside the sales funnel but who essentially emits some signals (such as visiting your website, downloading content, sharing email and phone number, etc.) that (s)he might conform to our target audience. However, we have to validate our assumption and qualify a suspect into a ‘prospect’. Before we get to the challenges to generate leads there are three more questions, we need to clarify in order to establish the market segment your product can be categorised. Those are:

What is your average revenue per account per annum (ARPA)?
How many accounts do you need to create $100Mn in ARR?
Who is your target customer? Is it a retail user, an SMB or an Enterprise?

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Lead generation is a process, a set of activities required to fill the top of a marketing funnel. It is the process through which a ‘suspect’ is converted into a ‘prospect’.

**Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital described 8 following types of products:**

1. A microbe: charging $1 a year per account to 100 Mn users e.g., WhatsApp
2. A fly: charging $10 a year per account to 10 Mn users, e.g., Yelp, Brainly
3. A mouse: charging $100 a year per account to 1 Mn users, e.g., Evernote, Mailchimp
4. A rabbit: charging $1K a year per account to 100K users, e.g., Shopify, Kajabi
5. A deer: charging $10K a year per account to 10K users, e.g.,Hubspot, Atlassian
6. An elephant: charging $100K a year per account, e.g., Salesforce, Demandware
7. A brontosaurus: charging $1M a year per account, e.g., Veeva, Workday, and
8. A whale: charging $100M a year per account, e.g., Palantir

Most SaaS companies selling to SMBs start as a rabbit and try to become a deer over time. A rabbit requires an automated no-touch sales process whereas a deer would need an inside sales organisation. For those who do not know the difference, an inside sales organisation has Sales Reps (SDRs) who sell to inbound leads remotely over call and a demo over the internet. A low-touch or no-touch sales process avoids using a human to close sales. The reason is that the LTV coming from the low-ticket size does not permit the availing cost of a sales team. The elephants, brontosaurus and the whale fall under the domain of hardcore enterprise sales with a longer sales cycle and requirement of face-to-face dedicated sales executives (ABS, Account-Based Sales).

Which Segment Does Your Product Appeal To?

From the above discussion three different market segments emerge:

1. B2C: Individual users, low ticket, high volume: microbe, fly, mouse
2. SMB: Small & medium business owners, moderate ticket size, medium volume: rabbit and deer
3. Enterprise: Large enterprises, high ticket size, low volume: elephant, brontosaurus and whales

With this context, let us attempt to understand the challenges to generate leads as these three different segments of users carry different procurement mindsets since they follow different decision-making processes.

Usually, all these companies would use a combination of the following channels to generate leads. Let’s delve deeper into these channels for lead generation before discussing common challenges faced in respective channels

Common Channels To Generate Leads

Content Marketing

People connect with stories. And where do we look for stories? The answer is obvious, the internet, especially social media. People on an average check their smartphone about 150 times a day. These are opportunities to grab attention. And nothing works more than a well-crafted story i.e., content in the form of a video, gif, meme, blog, vlog etc. Content marketing is one of the key pillars of marketing today.

Influencer Marketing (paid)

You have a group of followers (tiny or big) in the real world. However, you can’t broadcast a message to these people instantly if you so desire. But the social networks on the internet have made it possible for anybody to communicate to his or her captive audience on the network instantly. Power to people, you might think. Therefore, every person in a network is a micro-influencer. The celebrities such as a film star, a singer, or a sports star might have influence over millions whereas a local influencer might have influence over a few thousands. The difference is in degree not in quality.

This phenomenon of networking clubbed with our innate human bias for a recommendation from a known, likable face have created a new form of marketing, influencer marketing. Today you can pay selected (micro-)influencers to endorse your product on his or her social network and generate (micro-)visibility which in turn generate leads for your product.

Search Engine Optimisation (organic)

When you publish your website, search engines such as Google sends a crawler program to your website. The crawler picks up keywords from your webpages and indexes those in the google search algorithm. Based on several qualifying criteria that google changes from time to time a rank is generated for your website for certain keywords. This entire ranking process is unpaid or organic because google doesn’t take money from you to do this work. It takes some time before you can expect good results from such SEO efforts. However, a higher organic ranking on certain keywords that are relevant for you increases visibility organically and helps your brand establish its authority. SEO should be there in the long-term marketing strategy of your product and brand.

Search Engine Marketing (Paid)

This is the bidding marketplace where you bid an amount for certain keywords in google search. You get instant results in higher ranks within the paid-search listing hence get a share of attention from your target audience. Search engines are a two-sided network where on one side the ‘free’ users share their ‘intent’ with google in terms of the search keywords and google indexes those search terms and sells those to the willing bidders on the other side of the network and make money in the process.

Email Marketing

Email marketing, if done well can be called one of the forever green pastures for your brand. In this you build a well curated list of emails collected from the internet traffic you get (either organically or through paid marketing) on your landing page in exchange of offering some value to them (e.g., an eBook, information, access to your basic product etc). These are usually people who self-select to opt-in your list of email followers therefore can be a very relevant, effective and sticky audience. Once your list grows to a significant number you may plan sending them occasional updates of your activities along with product promotions.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing helps you to build a funnel in the selected social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, twitter etc. It has both organic and paid options just as in search engine platforms. These efforts are a must for building a recall of your brand and continuously engaging with your target audience. It can also help you build your own community of earnest followers through groups and pages. You may also use a technique called retargeting to follow along a prospect who showed some interest in your content across the social media.

Affiliate Marketing

This is a performance driven reward system that rewards the source (read affiliate marketer) for bridging a lead into seller’s funnel. It can also be linked to final sales rather than just providing a lead. There are affiliate networks that consist of influencers, bloggers, large media sites that help capture a lead and redirect them to the seller’s website.

Structures Of The Sales Organizations

There can be another lens to view these channels and the lead these channels generate.

Based on the effort to generate the leads, say we create a 2×2 matrix. The x-axis is divided into inbound and outbound. Inbound means the prospects discover the product online and call/reach the company sales executive, whereas outbound means the company sales executives call the prospects/leads generated through other marketing campaigns. On the Y-axis we plot the type of leads: organic, if the leads come through non-paid sources such as word-of-mouth, organic search (SEO) etc. and paid, if the leads come through paid marketing sources such as google paid search (SEM), influencer marketing (paid) etc.

No-touch: B2C

In this segment, the LTV is too low to allow for a large spend on customer acquisition. We can’t even afford a human closing a sale. Therefore, automation is the only way. Moreover, the expectation is to generate leads which are organic rather than paid over a period of time making the low lifetime value justified in the business model.

For example, nobody from Facebook came and sold you an account, you got sold yourself. Though you might feel you are not ‘paying’ any money to them. But the fact is you are paying in another currency, your ‘attention’. That’s what Facebook sells on the other side of the network, to the advertisers who want to catch your attention.

Google follows a similar business model. When you sign up for Gmail you don’t pay in the basic plan but when you use google search you share your ‘intent’ with google and google sells your ‘intent’ (read search terms, keywords) to millions of willing bidders on the other side of the ‘screen’. That’s how they make money.

It’s the continued ‘presence’ of users like yourself on the network that makes these two-sided platforms ‘valuable’. Therefore, they will go to any extent to get your ‘attention’ and keep you ‘hooked’ to their screen, if possible, forever.

Inside-sales: Medium ticket B2C & SMB

In some sectors, the sales ticket size is usually moderate, not too small nor too large. In such a case we can afford to spend some budget on what we call an Inside Sales organisation. In such a case online marketing is considered to generate leads, however, there will be a group of sales executives who would call these leads to close the sales over the phone or the internet.

Imagine an insurance agent selling your car insurance. She is going to call you before your renewal date and try to sell you an insurance product. You will never meet her in person. This kind of a sales effort is a low-touch sale more formally called an Inside Sales. It is called ‘Inside’ because the sale executives would never go outside the office to sell the product. The entire sale happens remotely.

The cost of customer acquisition here is higher than that of no-touch sales but this higher cost is justified by the higher ticket size and higher margin of the product, say, the insurance premium.

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In this article we have set the context of digital marketing with respect to the nature of the business, and pricing of products.

Enterprise Sales: Enterprise

Finally, we come to the large ticket contracts which are sold to large enterprises. These are large annual contracts for build-operate models. Often the deal size goes into tens of millions of dollars. Of Course, the time to close such deals are longer, there are many people involved in such a purchase, therefore, such sales require a lot of human contacts, face-to-face meetings, requirement gathering, proposals, counter proposals etc.

Think of companies such as TCS, Wipro’s of the world in the software domain, GE, Bosch’s of the world in the manufacturing domain.

The customer acquisition cost in such a sales structure is very high and the high-ticket sales justify those. Leads are generated mainly through outbound activities, be it paid or organic using a strategy called Account Based Marketing (ABM).

In this article we have set the context of digital marketing with respect to the nature of the business, and pricing of products. We have logically deduced three different segments (B2C, SMB & Enterprise) in the market for such products. We have also explored their uniqueness and deliberated on the kind of sales strategy appropriate for each segment. This article sets the context well for the next topic we want to cover next. We will discuss the top 9 lead generation challenges and possible solutions in the upcoming article, so stay tuned.

The post First Step to Generate Leads: Key Perspectives You Can’t Miss appeared first on Dutch Uncles.

9 Lead Generation Challenges and How to Solve Them

Avijit Dutta — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 08:18:14 +0000

In the article- First Step to Generate Leads: Key Perspectives You Can’t Miss -we have set the context within which any digital marketing efforts play out. We have also identified three different segments of sellers based on the effort they can afford vis-a-vis the LTV they stand to gain in their respective business models. We have also drawn three different kinds of sales organisations that are required to address these three very different needs. In this, we will discuss about how to solve commonly faced lead generation challenges.

The three segments of sellers and successively three different kinds of sales organisations were:

1. No-touch lead generation for B2C
2. Low-touch inside sales for SMB
3. High-touch enterprise lead generation for large enterprises.

Here are the top nine lead generation challenges across these three categories.

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Every company should realise, no matter what is their end product or service, they are in a media business.

Top 9 Lead Generation Challenges

No-touch Lead Generation (B2C)

1. 1. 1. Poor content on website, landing page, blog, vlog
    2. High bounce rate
    3. Improper targeting
    4. Low or no virality in content

Low-touch Inside Sales Lead Generation (SMB)

1. 1. 1. Calls going unanswered
    2. No show for demo
    3. Unable to reach a decision-maker

High-touch Enterprise Lead Generation (Enterprise)

1. 1. Unable to reach a decision-maker
  2. Inability to establish credibility as a thought leader

No-Touch Lead Generation (B2C): Poor Content On Website, Landing Page, Blog, Vlog

Every company should realise, no matter what is their end product or service, they are in a media business. By that, I mean having a great product will not be enough for the incumbent to win in a given market. A good product is a ‘given’ in today’s marketplace. What is equally important is how, where and from whom your end-users discover you and your product.

With penetration of broadband and now 5G networks, expectations of customers are way beyond just a good product. Even the buying experience is part of the deal. Therefore, content rules the game. Your digital assets such as your website, campaign landing pages, product landing pages, content on social media, YouTube etc have become too ‘expensive’ to be ignored. Let’s discuss a few common mistakes vis-a-vis the best practices around such components of a lead machine.

- - Website content should be communicating the value proposition clearly and succinctly without triggering a doubt in the minds of a reader. Omit all the superfluous words. Cover the problem your product is solving, and for whom. Then answer this question why you? Take some time to differentiate from the other players in the market and justify your claim by using social proofs such as verifiable testimonials (consider G2.com) of satisfied customers.
  - Landing Pages should be optimised for intent. The content and design on the landing page should be commensurate with those in your website as well as other social media. Your brand identity and voice should serve as a guide. The form is the key element in a landing page. Have great design and text that appeal to prospects to share information. You may consider 3rd party SaaS products such as leadformly.com, unbounce.com etc. if you struggle with aesthetic design.
  - On Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Q&A forums such as Quora, Yahoo answers you should be prompt in response. Your messages on these platforms create engagement with your audience. Use these opportunities to consolidate your brand story, voice, themes and values. Use marketing automation platforms (HubSpot, Hootsuite, etc) to manage all social handles from a single source of truth. Moreover, social media management serves as a lever for managing the online reputation of your brand (ORM). Consider tools such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, Trakur etc.
  - Vlogs / Podcasts / Blogs serve many purposes for a brand. It can drive engagement, help build a community, establish the brand as a thought leader besides being a point of talk in the town hence bringing in a share of the attention of your target users. In other words, these are lead generating machines that ask very little in return. Only ask is the regular posting of relevant and valuable content without sounding salesy. Offer people genuine value and they offer you word-of-mouth.

No-Touch Lead Generation (B2C): High Bounce Rate

If you are spending a lot of marketing dollars on getting traffic on your landing page but the bounce rate is way too high, think about what you are promising on your marketing hooks (e.g., social media bytes, paid marketing copy etc) and what the landing page has to offer. Your content communication on all the platforms has to be in sync.

There could be other reasons for low conversion on a landing page, some of those are technical some are related to design and communication. You may want to take help from other SaaS platforms who have solved specific problems in the value chain. For example, if you can’t design a great lead form it makes sense to get it done from places such as leadformly.com who focus only on building great forms that increase conversion.

No-Touch Lead Generation (B2C): Improper Targeting

Today, digital marketing tools allow us to target for the niches without spending too much. This was not the case earlier. Today you may reach a super idiosyncratic audience (meaning, say, a group of people with rare taste) easily without incurring a lot of cost, making your niche product a viable one. This was unthinkable ten years back. The market only had hits and misses. Today we have hits and niches. The point of sharing all these is that no market is too small today if you can target them well. You have to unmistakably pin down where in the long tail of the market your offerings exist.

Another common mistake committed in digital funnel building tactics is to become greedy in attracting a lot of people. If you use too broad keywords in your targeting filters which eventually end up in putting a lot of irrelevant ‘leads’ in the funnel eventually increase the cost per acquisition often to unsustainable levels. Therefore, adopt a mindset of experimentations and iterate through your selection of keywords to arrive at those few razor-sharp keywords that ensure winning paid customers.

No-Touch Lead Generation (B2C): Low Or No Virality In Content

One unmistakable feature of some of the most successful brands in this segment is the ability to develop viral content consistently. The logic is fairly simple. Since the LTV does not allow for a lot of spend on customer acquisition, there has to be some other lever for growth. Viral content serves that role exceedingly well.

However, there is a catch, virality is often unpredictable or at least so is common knowledge. Having said that if your content research is thorough you should be able to find a fuzzy zone of content that is likely to go viral if executed well and in time. Things go viral for many reasons but let me offer the top two: they tickle your funny bone for no good reason, or they offer outstanding value at unthinkable price or no price. Therefore, you may want to keep some effort in that direction so that your content strategy increases your odds of hitting a jackpot once in a while.

Low-Touch Inside Sales Lead Generation (SMB): Calls Going Unanswered

You got a lead from your online campaign. The prospect has shared his email and phone number. However, she doesn’t respond to further nudges like a phone call, SMS, email etc. You seem to have caught a ‘dead-fish’, or is it?

There may be many reasons why a person is not taking or returning a call. Your number may be listed as spam on true caller, she may be busy, she might not notice that you called or she might not be simply interested in your product but only the information she gathered by sharing her email and phone number.

The solution may lie in automation. You might want to put her on decently spaced (not 5 calls in a day, maybe 1 call in alternate days for three times before you disqualify the lead) automated voice calls with an option to connect to a real human. You might send her a nice short and crisp email with some additional value (like a newsletter, an eBook, some lucky draw, etc) and hope she comes back. Many won’t but those who would are likely to be more qualified leads.

Low-Touch Inside Sales Lead Generation (SMB): No Show For Demo

If your product requires a demo before sale then you know how maddening scheduling and calendar management can become for your sales reps.

Firstly, delegate the scheduling task to the lead by using platforms such as Calendly with pre-decided slots for each of your sales reps. This will save an enormous amount of time for the sales reps so that they can focus on the ones who are investing their times on the demo.

Don’t forget to send automated reminders for the upcoming demo. Take these opportunities (reminder notifications) to pep the prospect up by giving more content that invokes curiosity in attending your product demo.

If somebody has not shown up for a demo even after you have applied all the previously mentioned tactics, you may put them on an automated email list for follow up for a reasonable duration and forget about her till she returns. In all these communications, show empathy, personalise your message and offer genuine value. Again, content is king here. It is not what you reach out to people with but how you reach out ensures response.

Low-Touch Inside Sales Lead Generation (SMB): Unable To Reach A Decision-Maker

It might so happen to an inside sales team that the prospect took a demo, showed interest in following up the deal but then takes forever to close. These are signals that she might not be the decision maker in the organisation. She might have forwarded the proposal to her manager or the business owner, in case of an SMB and then nothing happens. How do you avoid such traps?

If you find yourself in such a situation, then pause and go back to your SQL questionnaire (Sales Qualified Lead). If you are wondering what such a questionnaire is, time to buckle up and make one. When a sales rep gets a marketing qualified lead (MQL), the first thing she does is run the lead through a series of qualification which validates that they have a need that can be served by your product, you know who is the decision maker and who is the influencer/user in the organisation, and most importantly you are including the decision maker in your demo.

If you don’t follow this process it is extremely likely that the sales will take a very long time to close, if at all. So, be alert in the early phase of lead qualification to save time and energy later.

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If you are wondering what a questionnaire is, time to buckle up and make one.

High-Touch Enterprise Lead Generation (Enterprise): Unable To Reach A Decision-Maker

Most things mentioned in 2.c above applied here. Additionally, in case of a large enterprise, the approval hierarchy might be even longer and you might have to give the same demo to multiple people.

To save time you might deploy an asynchronous sales tactic, especially these days where everything is remote it is not necessary that all the decision makers are in the same room at the same time. In that, the sales rep shares some documentation and preferably a recorded video demo with the prospects. They can review/watch it in their own time (therefore asynchronously), note their questions and you may take their questions or objections on a separate call.

This structure along with a meticulously planned content is much more likely to yield you results.

High-Touch Enterprise Lead Generation (Enterprise): Inability To Establish Credibility As A Thought Leader

To an enterprise client coming out as a thought leader in your own product niche plays a significant role in sales closure. The ticket size is high, the reliability on your product is also high hence the impact of a failure or things going wrong is significant for the enterprise. For these reasons enterprise buyers always look for established service providers with proven history of performance. The way they assess these are through peer reviews, validations by other larger enterprises (social proof) and the seller’s position in the market in terms of thought leadership within the product niche.

In such high-ticket sales, it is even more important to include in communications detailed case studies with previous clients, white papers, any IP, patents etc related to the product niche well documented.

In Summary

In these two articles we have explored the context of digital marketing with a focus on lead generation, we have articulated the top channels for digital outreach, we have logically segmented the market as per three dominant sales organisational structures, and finally we have discussed top nine challenges in lead generation across the three sales organisational structures and explored few logical solutions for same.

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