If your company is struggling to generate high-quality leads due to limited bandwidth, you’re far from alone. In fact, 65% of businesses say generating quality leads is their biggest challenge.
If you currently have a solid inbound marketing strategy in place, you might be wondering what else you can be doing to generate leads. Perhaps you’re thinking, “Does cold outreach really work? And if it does, how should our sales team go about it?”
Many companies shy away from adding outbound campaigns to their lead generation strategies. It could be that their sales teams are either too busy to focus on outreach, or because they simply don’t want to (48% of B2B salespeople admit they are afraid of making cold calls).
They also might believe it’s a waste of time since their sales teams don’t have the bandwidth to reach the 100’s (let alone 1000’s) of prospects each month they’d need. Or, they may have some outdated notion about what’s available in the cold calling services industry.
So, what’s the solution?
How can you add outbound strategies to your marketing plans that deliver well-qualified, warm leads that close at a higher rate? How does this work for teams that already have inbound marketing strategies in place?
In this blog, we’ll explore how using two best practices can help ramp-up lead generation for your B2B business: Integrating and Outsourcing.
Let’s dive in:
How Can I Generate More B2B Leads for My Business?
Integrating Your Inbound and Outbound Strategies
We often see marketing and sales departments sticking to their own silos. Marketing teams work on inbound strategies like content marketing, PPC advertising, and automated campaigns. Sales works on nurturing and closing the leads that marketing brings in.
However, breaking down these silos to get your marketing and sales departments working together is the key to optimizing your lead generation efforts! Integrating your inbound and outbound strategies to support each other will make them both more effective.
For example, let’s say you have a member of your sales team who makes a cold call to a prospect. That prospect gives your salesperson information about current issues their company is dealing with, and why now is not the right time to commit to your product/service.
If your sales and marketing teams are working separate, your salesperson may just drop this prospect into a nurturing campaign on their own and move on. They’ll send follow-up emails and check-ins, but they won’t do much else.
Now, imagine that your sales and marketing teams work closely together. When your salesperson informs marketing of the specific challenges this prospect is faced with, they may learn the marketing team has created an eBook that addresses this exact issue. Your salesperson can now share that eBook in his check-in to add value to his communications with the prospect.
Or imagine that your salesperson has a group of leads who are all facing a similar pain point. Instead of following up with each of them individually, your salesperson could pass that group of leads to your marketing team who can address the pain points efficiently and effectively with an email campaign, eBook, webinar or something similar designed to add value.
These are just two of thousands of examples we could give on the importance of integrating inbound and outbound marketing. But the bottom line remains the same: Finding ways to make your inbound and outbound strategies complement each other will lead to more successful campaigns for both.
Consider Outsourcing Your Lead Generation (Both Inbound and Outbound)
While integrating your strategies may get you better results in your lead generation campaigns, your efforts will still be limited by the bandwidth of your internal team(s).
It’s almost impossible to scale if you’re not able to increase your reach. And, if your sales team is already busy with the leads coming in from marketing, they likely won’t have time to start working on an outbound campaign. In this case, it will be a smart idea to collaborate with a company that offers lead-generation services to increase your efforts.
So, what’s the best way to overcome your bandwidth issue? How can you generate exponentially more leads to scale more quickly?
The answer: Outsourcing.
Outsourcing both your outbound and inbound lead generation to a third party can help your company:
- Utilize resources that expand your ability for outreach at a fraction of the cost of hiring in-house
- Save time for your marketing and sales teams, so they can focus more on high-level strategy and less on day-to-day tasks. To achieve this, integrate a proper multichannel contact center, train your staff, and make sure everyone is on the same track.
- Get warm leads delivered straight to your sales team so they can focus on closing more sales (or straight to your marketing team for further nurturing) without the time wasted researching, cold calling and chasing unqualified or dead-end leads
Essentially, outsourcing your inbound and outbound lead generation helps your business run much more efficiently. And efficiency generates growth! Not to mention, you’ll achieve a higher ROI. Outsourcing lead generation has been proven to generate 43% better results than in-house lead generation!
