B2B Sales Leads 4 Steps to Sales Ready Leads
I’ve been blogging about B2B lead generation for several months. In this post I will provide some detail into a specific technique we’ve been using that is very effective for B2B lead generation.
First, some assumptions:
- Your inbound marketing strategy currently results in visitor traffic to your website.
- Prospective customers visit your website during their evaluation process.
- People who visit your website are in various stages of their evaluation process.
- In many cases, they are not yet ready to talk with a sales person. They are often just interested in learning if your company’s offerings are a fit with their needs.
We know that visitors to a B2B website are most interested in understanding your offerings and your pricing model to determine if your offering fits within their budget.
However, most B2B companies have long believed that discussing price without demonstrating value is taboo. While there is some truth to that, it is also true that the typewriter was once a productive device to write a letter!
We now live in the age of transparency. Visitors to your website can remain anonymous across all their visits until they are ready to identify themselves to your sales team. The risk you take is that you can keep visitors engaged enough to bring them back to your website and eventually convert them to a sales lead. That’s a big risk…
Enter Self Service Budgetary Pricing as a Call-to-Action
Here’s how it works…..
Step 1: On one or more of your website pages, you offer a button or hyperlink (or both) with a call-to-action to request budgetary pricing.
Step 2: The user is presented a page that describes the process. You control the message. Generally, you state that you are offering budgetary pricing but a firm price quote will require a conversation with an expert to configure a price to their exact needs. This is a valid disclaimer for budgetary pricing. The user enters an email address to proceed to the next step.
Step 3: The user is presented with a menu of your offerings from which to choose. You can display as many or as few of your offerings as you choose. The user chooses the offerings of interest.
Step 4: The user is required to provide the remaining contact details including their name, company name, phone number and website. If the user abandons the process, the email was captured in the first step. Upon completion of this step, the quote request is submitted.
The Seller is in Control
Once the user’s request has been submitted, an email is sent to up to three people (in the seller’s company) for a human review. The purpose of the review is to determine if the budgetary price request appears to be legitimate prior to approving it. If the user didn’t enter valid details about their company, phone or website, you might choose to deny the request.
Business Rules Offer Lead Integrity
You can also set it up so that a user who enters a non-corporate email address such as gmail or hotmail is automatically rejected. The user is notified that a corporate email address is required to make a budgetary price request. Another rule can filter out competitors. Yet another rule allows you to designate select customer email domains to get directed to a designated pricing page. This allows you to direct existing customers to their pre-determined pricing page.
Budgetary Pricing Requests Produce Sales-Ready Conversations
In our Register to attend our webinar on January 19th at 12pm ET to hear from a customer firsthand how they generate valuable sales-ready leads using self service budgetary pricing call-to-actions on their website.
If you missed this webinar, check back often for the next webinar date.
6 Comments to B2B Sales Leads 4 Steps to Sales Ready Leads
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Price is only one factor in a decision making process. And, in my experience, it's the least important factor if you want clients that are worth acquiring. If a prospect wants to know price before they understand potential upside, they're not going to be as successful as a prospect that enters a buying process trying to understand what they have to gain for the appropriate investment.
Further, prospects need to know you can solve a problem, first. From our data, compelling educational, non promotional offers are significantly more important offers in getting a lead to be sales ready.
Budget requests are an interesting and solid late stage funnel offer. But, until I see some clickstream and conversion data about what happened before that conversion, some lead to customer conversion data and especially profitability data, I'm not convinced that this is an investment worth making until other lead gen practices are implemented.
Are you?
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Pete,
Thanks for your POV. This post doesn't present a case for leading with price or to publish pricing in B2B marketing. This post is about generating leads by allowing B2B prospects to request budgetary pricing because it's what they want EARLY in their evaluation process.The Marketing Sherpa/Enquiro study referenced in the post clearly shows that B2B website visitors are looking for pricing data to determine budgetary fit before engaging in the sales process with a vendor. It doesn't say that B2B visitors are looking for pricing data to make a decision. The research also confirms (in a chart) that pricing is sought most by B2B website visitors early in their evaluation, not in the late stages.
I totally agree that providing compelling educational content as calls-to-action are very effective at producing leads. However, educational content can produce a high quantity of leads, not necessary quality leads. Sure nurturing, lead scoring, etc., can filter out quality leads. But, this is simply another compelling call-to-action that has PROVED to result in quality leads.
All that said, a budgetary call-to-action for lead generation is not for all B2B marketers. This fits best for companies that sell products/services priced four figures and above with sell cycles longer than 30 days and a sales force focused on working qualified deals. Companies with a VAR channel also benefit by feeding qualified leads to VARs.
If you haven't read the e-book that shows the Marketing Sherpa/Enquiro study data, I suggest you download it. It's hyperlinked in the blog post.
Thanks again for your POV.
Bernie -
Michael,
Thanks for your POV. The research data in the referenced e-book clearly points that B2B buyers want pricing information early in their research. You and I are talking about two entirely different points.I'm am NOT saying to sell on price! This article is about lead generation, not closing the sale.
The books and workshops you mentioned are not the type of offerings that fit this technique. I failed to point out in this post that this method of lead generation is best suited for B2B companies with relatively high priced products and long cycles and a salesforce. A salesforce selling complex products/services needs to be focused on quality leads. This lead gen technique is not well suited for low price point products and short sell cycles.
Thanks again for your POV.
Bernie -
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