From Fortune 500 companies to startups, sales and marketing teams eagerly dial cold leads daily. Every day, they generate high-value leads that move down the sales funnel and convert.
Cold calling is far from dead, what’s dead is the pushy, boring, and poor message delivery.
Why does this lead generation tactic work? Because B2B prospects accept cold calls as long as the caller is relevant.
How do you make sure your message is relevant?
We share useful cold calling tips along with other marketing strategies to help you generate high-value leads.
1. Cold Calling
Most salespeople think the deal is won/lost the moment you have your prospect on the phone.
In an actual sense, the real winning or losing takes place before you make the call. It happens in your preparation.
Three key questions you should ask are:
Why Am I Calling?
Forget the superficial “because the contact is on my list”
Keep asking until you connect the call to what drives you. Your perspective about cold calling will change for the better.
What Do I Want to Achieve?
Again, “to close the deal” is too generic. Everyone wants to close deals, but what do you really want to achieve? Is it to be helpful to others, to grow the business, to become the go-to expert?
How Am I Going to Get There?
We’re talking about your game plan. Go into specifics to make it crystal clear.
You might think about how to prove measurable ROI, how to handle objections graciously, or how to get the prospect to invest emotionally
Once you have figured your why, what, and how you can move to the next step
- Make the call worthwhile by researching your lead. Look up their organization. Its mission, values, and pain points. If you have sound knowledge about your leads, you’ll deliver value.
- Use a call guide. Scripts are robotic and leave little room for an actual conversation while call guides are more flexible outlining areas of discussion and relevant questions. A guide assumes variable outcomes to help you stay on course.
- Avoid pressurizing your leads: Very few people (if any) decide on the first call. The point is to nurture them by hearing what they are saying and delivering relevant information.
Remember to follow up with your leads, while keeping in mind the manner they requested.
Some prefer emails over calls. Be prompt and provide relevant information that matches their needs.
2. Social Media
For marketers who are ready to move beyond “creating awareness”, social media is an ideal space for generating leads for nurturing.
What platform should you use?
The one your customers use.
Most B2B buyers hang out on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter.
Once you know where your leads socialize, here are some ways to capture them:
- Optimize your social profile to help you collect leads. Ideally, your profile should provide all relevant contact information for physical and virtual reach, plus call-to-action buttons for sign-ups.
- Create compelling click-worthy content. You’re not the only one vying for your audience’s attention and remember that attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.
- Keep content sharp and straight to the point and your images/videos even sharper.
- Gating your content is a reasonable way to collect prospects’ information. Make doing so worth their while by delivering quality. Gated content includes webinars, newsletters, white papers, or access to private social groups.
- Come up with user-friendly landing pages. Make them visually appealing and scannable with relevant information and a clear path for your visitor to follow.
- Create lead ads your team can sync to your CRM system or download for follow-up. Business users can take advantage of Facebook and Instagram lead ads or the Lead Gen Forms on LinkedIn.
3. Data is Your Partner
Data can be collected from different sources, including social listening, customer interactions, past promotions, sales transactions, consumer feedback, and surveys.
Analyzing this data can help you come up with objective decisions regarding your marketing strategies.
Here’s how to generate high value leads:
Start by Identifying Success Metrics
Look at the number of visits your site has garnered, number of downloads, and number of queries.
Check which downloads were more significant, and which queries were more prevalent.
Have a Plan
Give the data meaning by aligning it with your marketing goals and strategies. If you know what your goals are, you can engage in activities that will help meet them.
It’s not just about measuring the number of responses your campaigns receive daily, but also who they are from. This way, you can then isolate worthy leads for nurturing.
Come Up With Best Practices
As you look at which marketing campaigns work best and through which channels, you can create tactics that work or tweak/eliminate those that don’t.
Regularly repeating tactics and evaluating them will help you come up with effective methods for capturing leads.
Keep Testing
Constantly testing your data collection and evaluation process will help you continually improve your ability to find high-value leads.
4. Use Online Directories
Online directories are essentially global marketplaces, with service suppliers on one hand and clients looking for vendors on the other.
How will an online directory generate leads?
Most people conduct online searches to search for local businesses. They will typically look for a product, service, or topic rather than a particular company.
Since online directories categorize organizations by industry, nearby businesses will pop up when people search for related information.
Listing your company in an online directory places your business in the path of qualified prospective B2B buyers. It’s a superb way to increase awareness and visibility.
Examples of online directories include Google Business Listing, Apple Maps, Yelp, and EZLocal.
These directories contain detailed information concerning your business, like name, address, phone number, and website domain.
Further, the listings provide backlinks to your website telling Google your business is legit.
Experts caution against using too many directories, rather identify two or three industry-specific directories and list there.
Always ensure your contact info is consistent across the directories, social platforms, and website. It will enable proper referencing and ensure all inbound messages reach you.
The leads online directories generate contain names, email addresses, and phone contacts.
You can manually extract this information and paste it on an excel sheet or use lead generation software.
Whichever way you go, you’ll have in your possession a list of leads that you can nurture and convert.
5. Host Virtual Events
Virtual events are ideal for lead generation because of their diversity and ability to attract global audiences. With your net cast wide, you’re likely to generate more leads for your business.
Examples of virtual events for high-value lead generation include
- Education or instructional videos
- Conferences
- Webinars/Joint webinars
- Podcasts
- Q & A sessions
- Expert Panel sessions
- Online courses
To improve engagement and lead generation, here are some tips to keep in mind:
- Ensure all equipment works properly. The picture and sound quality must be top-notch.
- Invite industry experts to speak at your events or host joint webinars with non-competing brands in your industry. It will attract more high-value leads while allowing you to create lasting connections with the speakers.
- Set success benchmarks for the events. Think about how registrants you would like to have at your event and what you would like them to do afterward.
- Promote the event beforehand for a wider reach.
There are several other ways to engage your audiences as they watch the virtual events such as:
- Adding one click calls-to-action on the session page with information like request demo, start my free trial, call-back, or upgrade me.
- Conducting polls regarding the event, speakers, and topics.
The platform you’re using should tell you which attendees clicked the button or responded to your polls so you can start your lead qualification process.
You can also use the questions attendees ask to craft content for your next virtual event or to send personalized responses.
This approach is great for nurturing inquisitive attendees into paying customers.