Our Approach to Lead Generation: Empower Marketing to Empower Sales

Lead Generation is the method used to generate positive growth for your business by attracting, converting, closing, and delighting committed, loyal customers who will be ambassadors for your brand, because they value the experience they had with you.

Historically, the Lead Generation cycle has looked something like this: Marketing delivers leads and Sales closes deals. Sound familiar?

The problem with this is that it’s a simplistic mindset that doesn’t work when your product or service has a long buying cycle and requires multiple parties to be involved.

Many issues that contribute to poor growth within your business are caused by gaps between Marketing and Sales — misfires in understanding and alignment caused by these two departments working in silos. This often leads to 2 teams of people feeling pressure to accomplish goals that are independent of each other, and great leads fall through the cracks as a result.

We believe that aligning Sales and Marketing so they’re working together toward common goals is vital to effective Lead Generation. Many Salespeople feel frustrated, unsupported, and disconnected from Marketing… and often from the rest of the company. We have found, however, that when Marketing is supporting Sales by providing supporting collateral, streamlining processes, laying the groundwork for great relationships, and delivering higher quality leads, the whole company benefits.

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS

Lead Nurturing is marketing-speak for
building strong relationships.

Lead nurturing, according to Marketo, is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel.

To nurture a lead requires you to listen to them — find out what their problem is and what they need from you in order to solve it. Since about half of the leads in your system are likely prospects that just aren’t ready to buy, neglecting them could easily lead to the prospect dropping you out of consideration by the time they decide to purchase.

To combat this, you want a great lead-nurturing strategy. This is where Marketing and Sales can work together to determine what content and collateral leads need to receive at different stages of their buying cycle, which touch points along the way are helpful and which are turn-offs, and what can be automated to take some of the pressure off both teams.

The secret to effective lead nurturing is not to lose yourself in numbers, but to focus your marketing efforts on building a conversation and connection that keep you top-of-mind when it matters most.

In order to understand the strength of any given relationship, we find it helpful to develop a lead-scoring process unique to your sales cycle. Lead scoring is what helps Sales and Marketing pinpoint and standardize how much and what kind of attention is right for any given prospect. Ultimately, we use these scores to differentiate a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) from a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) in our communications with your Sales team.

How you define your lead scoring system is going to be specific to your business. However, we can tell you that your internal system will almost certainly use four basic metrics with numerical values assigned to them:

Fitness

Prospects who match target buyer personas would receive a higher basic score while prospects who don’t seem to match up with your product or service may require much more nurturing and education before becoming a Marketing Qualified Lead.

Interest

Engagements with your marketing team will increase a lead score. Every engagement is scored according to the type of content your prospect is interacting with. Decision level engagement would push the score higher than awareness level engagement.

Behavior

We use behavior triggers to determine when to engage directly with a prospect and how to score new leads. Not all new prospects are equally cold or warm. Initial behaviors inform us whether a new lead might already be in the final stages of a decision.

Stage

Different actions may indicate a prospect in different stages of the sales process. A prospect at a more advanced stage may be receptive to contact from your sales team, but a cold lead is likely to react poorly if they feel pressure from your sales team too early.

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The entire team is friendly, knowledgeable and extremely professional.

They have handled our website design as well as content creation and SEO management. They are always prompt in their responses and are great with change. We could not be more pleased with the results we have received from Waypost!

—Chad Henderson, Corporate Connection

 

Your Guide to Growth-Based Lead Generation

Waypost Marketing is focused on implementing proven, results-driven marketing and lead generation strategies to help our clients build strong relationships and generate qualified leads. Every company is different — with unique challenges and opportunities. Let us take our expertise and apply it to your growth goals and find out what can work for you. We’ll work with you to understand how you can capture leads earlier, qualify those leads faster, and measure your success with quantifiable results.

Give us a call at (864) 313-3594 or fill out the form below to request a consultation.

 
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