What is a B2B lead?
A lead is a person who has shown interest in buying products or services provided by one or more companies. B2B means business to business.
Therefore, a B2B lead is a person who is working for a company, is interested in buying products/services and is capable of making purchase decisions for the company he/she is working for.
B2B leads are not limited to buying products, B2B leads can also be understood as those who can represent their companies to engage in an activity or partnership with other companies.
For example, let’s say you’re looking to acquire a SaaS business in the finance niche and you’ve contacted many prospects. Anyone that has shown interest in discussing a deal with your company, is a B2B lead.
Why do you need to generate B2B leads?
As explained above, B2B leads are interested in buying from or working with a company, so they bring value to the company.
If the B2B lead bought something from a business, they helped the company generate money and everybody wants money!
In order to survive, businesses need to generate leads constantly. In fact, lead generation is the 2nd most crucial part of a company, right behind revenue generation.
The value a B2B lead brings to a company is usually much bigger than a B2C lead does. For example, if your business is selling PCs, a B2B lead can buy a number of PCs for his/her company compared to an individual buying one or two PCs for him/her (a B2C lead).
How to generate unlimited B2B leads?
Now that you know B2B leads are potentially your big customers and you want to have a lot of them. However, generating B2B leads is not easy. It’s a very challenging task for any business, especially when your company is a new one.
There are two intrinsic parts of lead generation, those are prospect generation and outreach. Outreach is basically contacting your prospects and getting them interested in buying your products or services. Let’s dive into these two most important tasks to generate valid B2B leads!
Prospect generation
There are several effective strategies to generate prospects for your business, those are:
- Buying excellent prospects from a good lead database.
- Using a combination of online marketing software to collect prospects.
- Building a scraper to harvest prospects from the Internet.
- Using Ads to generate prospects
- Building a lead magnet to get prospects.
1. Buying prospects
Buying prospects is the fastest and probably the most affordable way to generate good prospects (when done right).
A good B2B lead database provides you with features to help you get very specific prospects, down to where they are living, their job titles, companies, websites, social media accounts, email addresses, phone numbers and more.
When buying prospects, the most important factor to look at is data quality. If the prospects’ information is not accurate, you won’t be able to contact them.
Also, It’s very important to pick a good lead database to buy prospects from to make the most of your money. When looking for a lead provider, you must make sure they provide the following
- Free trials
- Excellent customer support to guide you through their platforms
- Refund policy in case you can’t find the prospects that you need.
- Discounts for first-time users
At Limeleads, we make sure you have a risk-free investment by providing all the above-mentioned and more.
You can sign up for an account after a few clicks and try our data for free. No credit card is required!
And when you decide to purchase a plan, we got you a sweet discount. Just contact our support via live chat or [email protected], we’ve got you covered.
2. Use marketing software to collect prospects.
You can use marketing software such as Ahrefs, SEMrush and Hunter to generate prospects. It can be relatively costly because you will have to pay for 2 or more software to perform this task.
On top of that, it can take a good amount of time and effort for you to learn about the software. However, this is proven to be an effective way to produce prospects in preparation for your outreach effort.
Depending on which software you use, the guide below is how you generally produce prospects using online marketing software.
- Pick a website as a model
- In SEMrush, put it into the search bar and hit ‘Enter‘
- Click the ‘Competitors‘ tab
- Hit ‘Export‘ button to download a CSV prospect list (domains)
- Open your email finder tool/software, import the domains you got in the previous step and start finding email addresses (You can target certain departments or roles in the software if it has it)
- When the finding process is completed, you can download the completed list. Now the list will contain email addresses (prospects)
3. Build a scraper to harvest prospects.
This technique is mainly about working with a qualified software engineer to build for you a scraper.
A scraper will crawl thousands of web pages to harvest the information you want. Those could be name, job titles, company name, email address, phone number, etc.
This technique can be very expensive as it’s about building the software from scratch. The cost can widely fluctuate depending on how many features you want to have and which developer you’re hiring.
This way is expensive but it’s likely a one-off purchase, meaning you won’t need to pay for future uses (if the scraper is complete)
4. Use Ads
Ads are one of the most effective ways to generate prospects and leads. However, it can be very expensive depending on which audience you’re targeting and your ad quality.
The average cost per click for Google Ads is between $1-$2 but it can go up to $12 or even $25 per click depending on which keywords and audience you’re targeting.
Social media ads like Facebook ads on average are a little bit cheaper for CPC but they generally don’t convert as well as Google Ads.
When you got clicks, it’s not over yet. In order to convert the users into prospects or leads, you will need to have a landing page designed specifically for it.
It requires some high-level knowledge to implement this strategy properly since it’s quite technical. However, when it works, it will be automatic and your business may rely on it as the main source of leads or prospects
5. Build a lead magnet to convert users into prospects or leads
A lead magnet is something that is useful to your users and it’s used to exchange for users’ contact information such as name, email address or phone number.
For example, you can create a good eBook and let your users download it for free in exchange for their email addresses.
The most popular lead magnet is an eBook, sometimes, it can be just a useful list of something. However, the more effort you put into creating the lead magnet, the better chance you’ll generate prospects or leads effectively.
An excellent lead magnet can produce a lot of valuable prospects for your business plus it’s relatively easy to create one. Therefore, we recommend trying this.
Outreach
An outreach strategy is a systematic approach to attracting new or high-priority customers. It involves contacting potential customers through various methods such as email, LinkedIn, or cold calling. The strategy is tailored to the specific needs of the business, the products or services offered, and the target market.
There are a few ways to reach out to potential clients in your prospect lists. The two most popular strategies are Cold Email Outreach and Cold Calling.
Each of them has its own pros and cons, however, Cold Email Outreach is the most used among marketers. You can read a quick comparison between Cold Emailing vs Cold Calling here to understand them better.
For Cold Emailing, it’s best to use email marketing software to schedule your campaigns so that you can send emails to thousands of prospects with minimum effort.
Follow Cold Emailing best practices here to implement this strategy properly.
Possible challenges of generating B2B leads
Businesses may encounter several obstacles when attempting to generate B2B leads. Some of the most prevalent challenges include:
- Inability to access accurate data: Precise data is crucial for the success of lead generation initiatives. Inaccurate data can significantly reduce the likelihood of reaching the appropriate leads, resulting in wasted resources.
- Poor integration across channels: This can result in inconsistent messaging and missed opportunities to connect with potential leads.
- Ineffective nurturing of leads: Failure to properly nurture leads can result in lost opportunities to convert them into customers.
- Inadequate methods for scoring leads: This can result in the pursuit of low-quality leads, wasting time and resources.
- Absence of partner services: This can limit the reach and effectiveness of lead generation efforts.
- Exclusive reliance on referrals: This can limit the pool of potential leads and result in missed opportunities.
Conclusion
Generating leads effectively has a huge impact on your business’ growth. If you haven’t tried any of the above strategies, start doing it now. Otherwise, you’ll be missing out on huge growth potential for your business.
If you’re a beginner and having a hard time figuring out the right path, we strongly recommend using a good leads database to generate prospects quickly.
If you have any questions or challenges revolving around lead generation and email marketing, don’t hesitate to contact us via [email protected] or through our on-site live chat support.