Identifying and nurturing potential customers is perhaps one of the most vital duties of a business, if not the most.
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Numbers show that while 53% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead generation, 61% believe it to be the number one challenge their businesses face. This dichotomy unveils a considerable gap between what the businesses aim for and what they usually manage to achieve.
How can big corporations that can shell out the money required to set up a robust marketing apparatus make their investments more efficient and cost-effective? I talked to Patrick Rhatigan, the CEO of 10G, regarding these issues.
10G’s vision is to accelerate revenue for B2B teams and was founded in 2017. 10G has facilitated $500 million in closed deals and worked with some of the largest companies in the world, including PepsiCo, Inc. (NASDAQ:PEP), Coca-Cola Co (NYSE:KO), Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE), Adidas AG (ETR:ADS), General Electric Company (NYSE:GE), IBM (NYSE:IBM), and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN).
The Five Lead Generation Commandments
According to Rhatigan, there are five lead generation commandments that all B2B teams should use to grow their revenue.
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Avoid The Boilerplate Outreach Strategy
The efficient use of data is primary in succeeding with your lead generation efforts. “The prospects should be built and nurtured the same way you build your team. The outreach strategy should not be arbitrary. Data must always guide you,” he states.
“Adding data and analytics in lead generation effort ensures accuracy in all three vital parameters of success. The first is identifying the right decision-makers. Reaching out to clients arbitrarily and randomly is a waste of time and resources. Data helps to cut the clutter and locate the appropriate point of contact.”
“Once these decision-makers have been identified, data also guides the marketing team to identify the right time of approach. The message should be clear and precisely on point. It should present the solutions that exhibit long-term value and flexibility with changing times and technology. Data plays a crucial role in that as well.”
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Keep Developing Your Resources
Rhatigan believes it is vital to keep reinvesting your profits and building your strengths rather than depending on services that offer support in bulk. Giving an example of his own company, Rhatigan says, “Unlike other lead generation companies, which rely on outside sales enablement platforms, we have reinvested our profits since we started 10G to build our software.”
Reinvesting profits to develop and strengthen internal systems and tools enables companies to finetune their services, making them personalized and efficient. And the flexibility that comes with a native solution can help companies keep themselves more agile.
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Seek Quality, Not Quantity
“We have taken a distinctly different approach. We look at previous successful deals of our clients to understand who the decision-maker was, which aspects of our clients’ offering appealed to them, how they’re using our clients’ product/service, etc.”
Analyzing such information can help companies keep ahead of their competitors. Talking about the strategy that his company 10G, employs, Rhatigan explains that his company does reverse engineer and prepare a client’s ideal customer persona or ICP.
“Based on this ICP, we use various micro indicators to determine a particular prospect set,” explains Rhatigan. Such hyper-targeting efforts result in quality meetings. It reduces time wastage by as much as 68%.
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Exhibit Client Diversity
“Successfully generating conversion-worthy leads requires appropriate mapping of the problem and the solution. Big corporations often have highly efficient services, products, and solutions that get lost in their broad and populated portfolio.”
“The flagship offerings often cast a shadow on the innovative solutions that could have proved highly successful if leveraged well. Delving deeper to understand the range of products, services, preparing service areas, and target layouts can make a difference here as it can result in an efficient conversion.”
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Power Your People
Building and executing successful lead generation strategies require an efficient team. Remember that business strategy equals people strategy, and the key is finding, hiring, training, and retaining the right people who are good at locating and nurturing leads. Eventually, these efforts result in the team creating quality, sequenced omnichannel campaigns, not to mention executing them at scale.
“Unfortunately, the landscape has changed and keeps evolving, leaving slow adopting businesses behind. This is a big danger, especially to small to medium businesses that must balance building an internal sales team with the expertise and tenacity needed to drive new business. This is proving prohibitively expensive for many companies,” says Rhatigan.
“Build data-driven outreach strategies from the ground up to engage decision-makers with the perfect message at the right time. Then create processes to take care of the qualifying and scheduling meetings with your ideal prospects so you can focus on what matters most, closing deals and growing your business.”