A practical guide to B2B lead generation for New Zealand tech companies

Wikipedia’s definition is ‘’ . . . the initiation of consumer interest or enquiry into products or services of a business.’’ Necessarily broad, this definition does capture that the definition of a lead can be very broad, but at its core, it is simply someone who has voluntarily indicated some interest in your product.

Leads are not one class of interested people, but a cover-all term for people as they go through a buying process. For B2B technology companies these buying cycles can be long and complex so it makes sense to break down the definition of lead into several stages:

• A ‘raw’ lead: a potential buyer who has voluntarily indicated interest in your product (e.g. converted on a website form, given you a business card at a trade show). They are a new addition to your database, but in no way qualified as a prospect for your business.
• A ‘marketing qualified lead (MQL)’: this is a raw lead that you have been able to qualify as being in your target market (i.e. the right sort of job position and the right sort of company in the right location). They could become a prospect for your business, but you don’t have enough information to determine that.
• A ‘sales qualified lead (SQL)’: the final phase of a lead, where you have determined the person is not only from your target market but has a genuine need that your product can address, has buying authority and wants to purchase relatively soon. They are ready to actually sell to.

The raw leads, MQLs and SQLs form your ‘sales funnel’. Sometimes firms make the mistake of only focussing on SQLs and ignoring the previous stages as not worthy of their effort. To be efficient about your selling however you need to be filling the top of this funnel with your lead generation activities so your sales team have plenty of MQLs to work through when SQLs start to dry up.

The marketing and sales funnel

The other mistake tech firms make is expecting sales to do all of the work to generate raw leads and MQLs. We call it a ‘lone-wolf’ approach, where talented sales people are left to do it all, from finding new prospects right through to signing the deal. Many of them can achieve this, but it’s fundamentally inefficient.

What tech firms need is to focus on repeatable lead-generation programmes that develop raw leads and MQLs and nurture them to SQLs.

Like any good structure, a lead generation programme must be built on a solid foundation. Clarity around the following three questions is important before you start investing:

• People: who are selling to? What sort of buyers are you targeting in what sort of companies in what sort of industry or geographical markets? Marketing works by focussing on as small a market as possible to generate profitable business. Marketing to everyone equates to marketing to no-one. You need to understand your target markets, and then the buyer personas within those markets.
• Purpose: what problem are you solving for these people? For example, buyers don’t want your accounting software product, what they do want is to make better decisions about their finances. You need to be focussed on those problems.
• Proposition: if you have a real market to focus on, then there will be many other vendors targeting those customer problems. What you also need is to be able to articulate how you can solve these problems in a unique way. Is your solution the best quality, does it give a faster result, is it cheaper, better supported etc?

With this foundation in place you are ready to build a lead generation plan. This involves building a sustained ‘system’ of generating and nurturing buyer interest, which looks something like this:

The components of this system are:

• Website: this acts as the hub of lead generation activity, where you are trying to drive people to learn about what customer problems you solve and how you do that. A good lead generation website will offer content at different stages of the buying process – helping buyers as they are understanding the nature of their challenge and how to address it (awareness), when they start to understand how your solution could solve their problems (appreciation) and finally turn to evaluating your solution as something to invest in (attraction). Most of this content will be freely available, but a subset must be gated behind landing pages so you can generate the names and email addresses that form your leads.

• Digital attraction: blogging, search engine optimisation, email marketing, online advertising, social media and more are all digital tactics for generating leads, primarily by driving traffic to your website for conversion.
  
  
• Offline attraction: trade shows, direct mail, telemarketing and PR are all examples of tactics that aren’t primarily online, but should also be designed to drive traffic to your website for conversion

Two tools are useful for getting your lead generation going.

First is building a 90 day content plan that focusses on producing content for your target buyers. Here’s some examples of the types of content you can produce for different stages of the buying process. What’s critical is having a subset of content (e.g. an eBook or calculator) that is of sufficient interest and value to your target market that they will ‘pay’ for it with their contact details. We call them ‘conversion assets’.

Sales are what drives any tech business, and so your sales team is rightfully is seen as absolutely key. Marketing’s primary job is focus on producing leads for the sales team to work with, so sales people can spend more time on closing qualified opportunities than trying to prospect and cold call.

Too often teams end up talking past each other, with sales not seeing marketing as delivering the right quality of volume of leads, and marketing thinking that the sales team aren’t chasing the opportunities they’ve created efficiently enough.

Ideally, marketing and sales should formally agree their respective roles, even to the extent of agreeing a service level agreement. Marketing agrees what it commits to in terms of the volume and quality of leads on a monthly basis for instance.  Sales, in turn,  promise to respond to those leads in a certain time frame with the right level of effort. 

Along with this alignment between marketing and sales, applying technology is what can really accelerate your lead generation. That starts with a CRM.

At the heart of your marketing and sales tech is a customer relationship management (CRM) system. It is the repository of all your ‘leads’, from the rawest through to your most loyal customers. It is essential for efficiently driving your B2B lead generation programme.

According to our Market Measures survey, only 16% of New Zealand tech companies don’t use a CRM. Of those that do, HubSpot (25%) is the most common choice, followed by Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Primarily a CRM helps your track a prospect (i.e. a company and the associated contacts) through the buying process, from SQL through to closed deal. A good CRM also stores all the information about your leads, tracking your interactions with them (e.g. emails sent, meetings booked, calls made) and theirs with you (e.g. website visits, email opens, form completions). It also has a suite of tools to make a sales person’s life easier, whether it’s automated emails, calendar sharing or automated workflows to guide the selling process.

Marketing and sales teams who use technology like CRM effectively, drive growth at five times the rate of those that don’t.

Technology has exploded with all sorts of software applications to make selling your stuff to people easier, faster, better. As the world has become more connected, through their computers, cell phones and even televisions, marketers have an enhanced ability to find and persuade consumers to buy.

While there may be over 7,000 marketing technology products out there at last count, you just need to focus on four categories to drive your lead generation: