Many businesses focus too much on their products—the latest features, how they beat the competition, or how their product is worth the price. That’s a lot of “me” talk.
Instead, we must shift the focus toward our business leads and create value in every stage of the customer journey. This ultimately creates a win-win situation for us and our leads.
But with fierce competition, volatile markets, and ever-changing customer needs, staying relevant becomes a challenge. A dynamic business lead generation strategy solves this issue.
By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to navigate the ebbs and flows of your industry, identify customer needs, and give value at each stage of the customer journey. First, we need to learn:
- What is a business lead?
- The importance of a business lead’s customer journey
- Where to find business leads
- How to create value at each stage of the customer journey
What is a Business Lead?
Think of leads as diamonds in the rough. These people might provide value to your business, but they could also burn through resources fast.
Leads must be segmented, qualified, or filtered out to find the most likely to convert. You end up with a list of “sales leads” or business leads.
A business lead is a person who shows interest in your product, has a budget for a solution, and has purchasing power. SDRs need to nurture and build relationships with these people.
With the right strategies, SDRs can nudge business leads further down your sales pipelines. But, no matter the strategy, we must give value at each step of the customer journey.
The Importance of a Business Lead’s Customer Journey
Customers' decisions on what product to buy have drastically changed, especially in industries like SaaS and B2B. Leads have all the content necessary to make informed decisions themselves.
Take SaaS, for example. No matter your niche, most companies invest heavily in content marketing that provides value to their audience. The main differentiator becomes convenience.
How fast can your audience get to the exact solution they need? How easy is it for them to move on to the next step? How much time and resources can you help them save?
The answers to these questions directly improve the customer journey from the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom. But, before providing value to business leads, we must find them first.
Where Can You Find Business Leads?
Your lead sources should already be considered part of your qualification process. If your source already has qualified leads, you don’t need to spend extra time on validation. Here are the sources we recommend for finding quality business leads:
Lead Finder Tools
Lead finder tools help streamline the lead acquisition process. Most free tools you’d find are Chrome extensions that help you extract lead data manually.
If you want to scale, you need tools that can help you find leads that fit your ICP and buyer persona in bulk. Use tools with advanced search filters and updated data.
Don’t forget to verify your leads as well. But, if you want access to pre-verified leads, you can use tools like Instantly B2B Finder. There’s no need to switch between apps!
After building your email list, you can immediately run cold outreach campaigns with Instantly and track leads in your pipelines with our Dealflow CRM.
Inbound Marketing Campaigns
Inbound sales strategies like blogs, gated content, or social media content marketing are great for filling your pipelines with quality business leads.
Here, leads go to you. You’re providing valuable information during a customer’s research phase. So, you’ll mostly be dealing with top-of-funnel leads.
There are also ways you can pre-qualify inbound marketing leads. For example, case studies, infographics, or eBooks can be locked behind a simple lead capture form.
To download the content, leads need to enter a valid business email. You can use automation to filter out the leads that fit your qualification standards.
Outbound Sales Campaigns
Outbound sales campaigns like cold calling or emailing are excellent for qualifying leads. But this isn’t the easiest strategy to get into.
However, once you get the fundamentals, outreach campaigns like cold emails provide some of the highest ROI. There’s a lot to consider with outreach campaigns, especially cold emails.
If you want to learn the basics, here’s our guide on how to send your first cold email. One of the most important fundamentals is automating email warm-ups and domain authentication.
Nurturing cold leads via email campaigns helps you understand if they truly benefit from your offerings. This is where proper sequencing or cold drip emails come into play.
Referrals
Referrals are leads with some of the highest conversion rates. That’s because people trust peers more than any marketing strategy. According to studies, 92% of customers say referrals from peers are the purchasing factor they consider most.
The best part is that getting referrals is easy. You must incentivize referrals, create value for new leads and current customers, and ensure a seamless customer experience for everyone.
Doing so cultivates a stronger relationship with new and existing customers. Instead of just building a “customer base,” you’ll be building an active and engaging community.
This ultimately leads to increased customer loyalty, more repeat business, and a high-converting business lead source.
Communities
Online communities are a lead gold mine with the right strategies. Let’s say you’re into X niche. You’d naturally be inclined to join a community that focuses on that.
Here, people can share tips, and best practices or find businesses that need solutions for their specific issues. But don’t go into these communities with the sole intention of shilling.
Remember to provide value—network with the right people. More importantly, builds relationships and authority. This will help keep you top-of-mind when leads are ready to take the next step.
You can find communities on platforms like Reddit, Facebook, or Slack. If you’re focused on the email marketing niche, join Instantly’s Cold Email Masterclass Community.
Nurturing Business Leads To Enhance The Customer Journey
Creating an irresistible offer, providing value, and finding the right lead sources help SDRs focus on business leads with high buying intent. But high buying intent doesn’t mean a deal is closed.
To ensure the highest chance of conversions, we need to enhance each stage of the customer journey with the proper nurturing strategies such as the following:
Email Nurturing
You can easily nurture business leads through email marketing with the right sequencing software. Make sure the content is relevant to your audience.
Personalize your emails and offer immediate value. Identify the type of content that resonates better with specific audience segments. Find what works and A/B test campaigns.
Don’t forget to measure key performance indicators. For email marketing, these are open rates, reply rates, bounce rates, conversion rates, and overall ROI for each campaign.
Email nurturing can also be done at scale using drip automation. But you don’t want to send the same emails in bulk. To avoid issues, use Spintax on your email copies or subject lines.
Retargeting
Retargeting or re-engagement campaigns help keep your business top-of-mind. But you can’t just “retarget” every lead that didn’t engage with or respond to your marketing or sales efforts.
You must be strategic about which leads to retarget. For example, if you’ve already conducted a product demo but a lead hasn’t responded, you could try retargeting with a free trial.
Retargeting campaigns by using strategies like email marketing or social media ads. Different segments may engage differently with your ads.
Some factors to consider include the platform you’re running ads on, your audience’s industry, job positions, geographic location, or age.
Customer Segmentation
Segmenting your business leads helps you personalize your outreach strategies at scale. You won’t be able to personalize 1000 email copies manually.
However, you can find 1000 companies with the same number of employees, yearly revenue, and pain points. This makes personalization easier as the leads are segmented.
For example, if you’re a SaaS company selling inventory management, you might want to segment business leads based on company size or scale of operations.
The bigger the company, the more likely the need for complex solutions. You could offer custom solutions for these leads. Meanwhile, smaller companies might just need your basic plans.
Follow-up
Follow-ups are the secret sauce to all outreach campaigns. You won’t close a deal after a single email, but the chances of getting a response drastically improve after a follow-up.
It doesn’t even have to be a positive reply. Just a reply by itself can be considered a win. You can always handle objections and try to turn a “no” into a “yes.”
But the best way to run follow-up campaigns is with the help of automation. If you don’t know where to start, check out these sales follow-up templates.
As a rule of thumb, you want to send follow-ups based on lead activity (or lack thereof). For example, you can start automated follow-ups after:
- Trigger events like clicking a link, a newsletter subscription, or any CTA.
- Sending a quote to your leads.
- Leads didn’t respond to your initial emails.
- Bottom-of-funnel actions like finishing a product demo.
Optimizing BOF (Bottom-of-Funnel) Actions
Business leads who are ready to buy your products/services are at the bottom funnel of your sales pipelines. Nurturing BOF leads are key to higher conversion rates.
SDRs must already know how to handle immediate objections, present solution-focused content, and practice effective sales closing techniques.
Here are some of the strategies you can implement to optimize your BOF content and provide value at the last stretch of the customer journey:
- Present detailed product comparisons between you and competitors. Don’t make it negative. Instead, emphasize how your product stands out.
- Offer special discounts or promos to incentivize leads to make a purchasing decision. Try implementing strategies like FOMO to present a sense of urgency.
- Provide high-value BOF content like case studies or testimonials. Make sure the case studies are relevant.
- Create an intuitive and easy-to-navigate pricing page. Include all the different plans, the benefits, and a flexible payment option when possible.
Conducting Surveys
What could be a better indicator of nurturing success than the experience of the leads themselves? Conducting surveys helps you build a connection with leads and a deeper understanding of their wants and needs.
Collecting feedback from previous customers gives you an in-depth look into their preferences, what they find convenient, and what you can improve upon.
If customers feel the journey from the top of the funnel to the bottom was unsatisfactory, there might be underlying issues within your sales funnels.
Identifying these issues right away helps prevent any unwanted effects down the line. So, collect feedback, and incorporate their comments into your next lead nurturing strategy.
Improving Sales Content Assets
Sales content assets are resources that enable your SDRs to engage with business leads better during the final stages of the customer journey.
Most sales teams need access to a robust library of sales content pieces they can share whenever prospects have an inquiry or an objection. So, SDRs need immediate access.
Ensure your sales content asset library is easily accessible to your team and the leads you’re trying to convert. Here are some example sales content asset must-haves for every business:
- Case studies or white papers
- Relevant industry blog posts
- Objection handling playbook
- Sales templates
- Presentations for demos or product tours
Key Takeaways
Qualified business leads are more likely to convert into a sale. But just because they show high buying intent doesn’t mean a sale is closed. We must nurture business leads to nudge them further down the sales pipeline using strategies such as:
- Email marketing or email nurturing campaigns.
- Retargeting leads or re-engagement campaigns.
- Segmenting customers to provide tailored content in bulk.
- Sales follow-ups based on trigger events.
- Optimizing bottom-of-funnel (BOF) actions.
- Improving sales content assets to enable SDRs at every stage of the funnel.
When it comes to nurturing, nothing beats the power of automated personalized email sequencing at scale. Start nurturing and converting leads with Instantly! Try it for free today!