Without leads, you can’t make sales. And without sales, you don’t get revenue.
Sales lead generation kickstarts your sales funnel and nurtures them into buyers or even ambassadors for your brand. It also asks an important question: What does your potential customer want?
Generating sales leads doesn’t have to be a costly process. There are a lot of options available when deciding how to generate leads in sales.
Ensure a regular stream of leads, whether inbound or outbound sales and grow your customer base and your business. On top of that, you’ll get the information you need to fill the sales pipeline with more leads and can tweak your strategies over time.
Inbound vs Outbound Sales: Which Is the Best Way to Generate Leads For?
Before anything else, let’s discuss the difference between inbound and outbound sales. Deciding which one is better for your business lets you know what path to take on and how to generate leads.
Your sales lead generation techniques will depend on your customer base, business model, and budget/ability to invest. In simple terms, inbound sales is when buyers come to you while outbound sales is when you initiate the contact. Let’s dive deeper into each one to further understand inbound vs outbound sales.
Inbound Sales
Inbound sales means that a prospect sought out your business to ask about the product or service you offer. They may be drawn in by your ads, the blog posts you publish on your website, or any of the lead source channels you use.
Inbound sales lead generation puts a focus on making it easy for your brand to be easily found online. It helps buyers learn about your business or product rather than directly selling to them. These prospects stay engaged with your content and, later on, convert to paying customers.
This is ideal for many businesses across industries such as:
- IT
- Finance
- Manufacturing
- Merchandising
- Healthcare
- Media and marketing
Outbound Sales
In contrast to inbound sales, outbound sales has a more orthodox approach to getting new revenue. It’s also a vastly effective one! In fact, data shows that 82% of buyers agree to meetings with proactive sales agents.
Outbound sales is when a sales rep goes directly to a market to pitch the product or service your business offers. Sales agents reach out to prospects who may not have heard of your brand yet or haven’t expressed an interest in your product.
Sales reps call or email prospects and engage them with strategic messaging to convert them into buyers. Outbound sales lead generation often assures fast results and quality leads.This is great for service businesses, especially growth-stage SaaS companies.
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Best Practices for Generating Leads in Sales
Once you choose whether you need to focus on inbound or outbound sales, the next step is to decide what actions to take on how to generate leads for your business. Here are some surefire ways you can get qualified leads to drive your sales:
1. Determine Your Target Audience
You can’t reach and sell to your ideal customers if you’re targeting the wrong audience for sales lead generation. That’s why you need to know exactly who your target audience is by doing market research and looking into industry trends and competitors.
It’s also helpful to create personas to identify specific segments of your target audience. This will give you an idea of the general demographics, personalities, and needs of your ideal customers.
Use Google Analytics to get data about the people visiting your website. You can choose the promotional methods to effectively reach your target audience using the data on where to get sales leads.
2. Build and Work with Your Network
Your network—composed of your family, personal and work friends, past and current business associates, and so on—can be a powerful tool to generate sales leads. They can be the leads you can pursue and what’s great about it is you already have their trust.
Make sure that you choose the right type of people or business from your network. Be transparent with your objectives by describing your target audience such as:
- The industry they’re in
- Business size
- Sales and revenue ranges
- Geographic location
Your network can also extend to your current customers. Referrals and word-of-mouth, especially for outbound sales B2B, are more likely to convert into leads than people reached by cold email or prospect outreach.
Each time a deal is successfully closed, your outbound sales rep may take advantage of this opportunity. They can ask if your customer knows any company or person who may be interested in your product.
Remember to provide an incentive to get your customers to refer and don’t forget to provide your contact information.
A network provides valuable help in boosting the efficiency of how to generate leads in sales. Aside from the element of trust, they are also likely to have diverse sets of contacts. If they have a connection that matches your target audience, they can reach out to them on your behalf.
On top of that, you can grow your network and get more leads by attending in-person and online networking events relevant to your niche.
3. Take Advantage of the Chat Technology
Live chat and chatbots can give you a chance to generate leads in sales. They allow consumers to easily get the information they need in their buying process. In fact, live chat can improve every stage of the customer journey:
- A 29% increase in marketing awareness
- 32% in early-stage sales development
- 39% in post-sales customer support
This means that there’s a 40% boost in the overall website conversion rates of a business that uses live chat!
Set up chat features on different platforms to get more leads. Make sure to greet website visitors with a chatbot welcome message. Include basic info about your business and different options for them to further engage.
Providing live chat on your social media pages can also improve customer experience which will help you nurture leads. You can then use your captured data and bot analytics (tags, notes, chat histories, custom variables, and attributes) to help your human agents interact with leads.
4. Use Outbound Calling Scripts Effectively
Having a strong outbound sales script ensures a degree of consistency prioritizing effective techniques over less useful ones. They also help speed up the sales process, especially your lead gen.
A standard script provides a ‘control group’ against which you can measure the results of experimental approaches. This allows you to support your sales reps’ strengths and individual performances. It also provides consistent responses for any customer pain point.
Best practices include: being helpful, answering questions, helping assess their options fairly, and references to other businesses if needed. Ultimately, you will earn their loyalty with the possibility of referrals.
Take, for instance, Apple. It aims to pivot any customer interaction into a great experience. They build rapport with their customers and solve confrontations with dissatisfied ones.
This sales strategy enables Apple to sell at least 17x more than the usual US retailer. It takes $341 for an average retail sales per square foot while Apple’s is more than $6,000. Results are seen from their 14-day training program focused on psychological sales training.
5. Employ Omnichannel Tactics
Supplementing sales calls with a focus on other channels can be highly effective. When following up, use the channel your prospects are most receptive to. Ask your sales rep to send them private messages on social media or send marketing content by email.
Implementing a follow-up schedule is important to relieve possible stress for your prospects. Follow up on the platforms they use for a better chance of connection. Conversion rates rise dramatically with the fifth follow-up and most prospects will need a few follow-ups before they’re ready to buy.
A good outbound sales SaaS collects prospects’ data whenever they subscribe to your newsletters or website. This will be helpful with qualifying leads and choosing how best to follow up. With your business using omnichannel tactics coupled with the right sales process, you can get more leads which means more conversions and boosted sales.
6. Automate Your Sales Process
Set up sales automation for repetitive and procedural tasks. This can reduce sales costs by speeding up the reporting and admin processes, resulting in automatic outreach to prospects in the top of funnel leads.
Sales automation helps reps do their jobs quickly and efficiently. We’ve listed five automation tools that can help your sales team sell more:
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Auto Dialing
Saves outbound callers from having to dial calls that failed to connect and keeps them on the phone ready to talk to customers. It’s a great way to increase outbound sales calls without straining your sales reps.
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Email Sequences
This allows your outbound sales reps to reach out or follow up on people using a series of automated emails so your prospects can be converted into customers.
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CRM software
Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you in organizing and keeping your customer data for sales and marketing purposes. For example, it can automate the process of adding contact history to all customer entries.
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Automated Voicemail Tools
Automated voicemail tools send voice messages digitally without using any other standalone equipment. These save time and effort for your sales reps when they are leaving messages. They also help when people try to reach your business during non-operating hours or high-traffic times.
Add Magic to Sales Lead Generation Campaigns
Put your plan in motion immediately after you work out how to generate leads for inbound and outbound sales. Within 72 hours, Magic can match you with a qualified sales assistant to help you improve and implement your sales lead generation campaigns.
A Magic Sales Assistant will handle the admin work in sales-related activities to help your sales team close more deals. Here are some of what a Magic Virtual Assistant can do:
- Data scrubbing and mining – conduct market research, analyze industry trends, create ideal customer profiles
- Cold calling – prospect and schedule sales calls, handle inbound/outbound calls, follow up on leads
- Lead generation – oversee campaigns, liaise with internal and external people, organize CRM, process and qualify leads
Learn more about Magic’s hiring process or hop on a call with us to discuss how we can help your business grow!
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