What Is B2B Lead Generation? Tips for Business Growth

Having a variety of B2B lead generation strategies at your disposal will increase your chances of finding new customers. No doubt about it.

Why? Because B2B lead generation strategies help you identify and connect with potential customers, build relationships, expand your reach, enhance your content marketing strategies, and leverage data and analytics to optimize your efforts. They allow you to proactively connect with potential customers, establish credibility, and nurture leads, thus increasing the likelihood of converting them into paying customers.

Sound simple? Unfortunately, a recent study from Hubspot revealed that 61% of marketers rank lead generation as their number one challenge. Generating leads, especially without the proper strategies in place, is challenging.

But, don’t fret. In this article, we’ll break down B2B lead generation and the types of B2B leads, as well as provide you with three surefire lead generation strategies.

What Is B2B Lead Generation?

B2B lead generation is the process of finding businesses that are interested in your company’s products or services. Interested businesses have a need that your business’s offering fulfills and when awareness is generated through your communication strategy, they become a potential purchasing customer.

Potential purchasing customers (leads), should be ranked and scored by how close they are to purchasing from your company.

Types of B2B Leads

When it comes to ranking and scoring B2B leads, you’ll often hear terms such as sales-qualified leads, marketing-qualified leads, service-qualified leads, product-qualified leads, or simply hot and cold leads. If you use a CRM, you may even have your own terminology. This type of labeling generally has to do with which department has “stamped their approval” that the lead has met the criteria of being ready for a sale.

Ranking and scoring leads help your team find better ways to nurture leads into sales prospects. Scoring also includes your previous touchpoints with prospects, their interest level, how informed they are on your product or services, and their content preferences.

Understanding and documenting these details will help you to create personalized content, which is a must when working with a B2B sales funnel.

How to Generate a Sales Lead

Strategies for how to generate B2B sales leads depend on your target market, your offering and your preferred go-to communication method. Given the nuance, we’ve provided three different B2B lead gen strategies to inspire you.

1. Cold Email Outreach

Cold outreach is an art. Sending emails to potential buyers with no prior relationship can be outright daunting, but there are benefits to this B2B lead gen strategy over others.

First, it’s cost-efficient. Litmus recently revealed that cold outreach marketers receive $36 for every dollar spent using the strategy. It can also be heavily targeted by using a company email finder, such as Anymail Finder, as you can access the email addresses of the people in relevant companies and positions for your product offering.

Prior to sending those cold emails, make sure you’ve read the best practices for writing a cold outreach email.

2. LinkedIn Lead Generation

Your professional network on LinkedIn is a great starting point for high-quality leads. Start by using LinkedIn’s advanced search filters to identify and connect with your target audience. You can search for prospects based on criteria such as industry, job title, company size, location, and more.

Then, in addition to sending them personalized connection requests, use Anymail Finder’s LinkedIn Email Finder Chrome Extension to acquire verified email addresses. Ensure your first point of contact isn’t generic or spammy. Focus on building meaningful connections.

Once you have connected with, ranked, and scored your new leads, you can also develop a LinkedIn specific content strategy to interact with and engage with them. Consider sharing relevant content, such as articles, blog posts, videos, and other relevant resources, that provide insights, address pain points, and offer solutions.

3. Generate Inbound B2B Leads With SEO

When done right and with time, SEO is another good way to generate B2B leads. When you begin ranking for an important keyword, you generate leads organically which is always a great start to a seller/buyer relationship.

Plus, if you can get organic visitors to sign up for your newsletter, you’re then able to send them targeted content getting you 10 steps closer to a potential sale.

Prospect and Connect

Having a diverse array of B2B lead gen strategies at your disposal is a must in today’s multi-media, multi-channel landscape. Businesses are well-informed and seek information on a variety of channels before ever making a purchase decision. If you can find prospects, connect with them via. personalized emails, and deliver them the right content using data-driven analytics you will be lightyears ahead of the competition.

To get started, explore Anymail Finder’s free email finder services and start streamlining your B2B lead generation efforts.