Any B2B marketing executive will tell you that his or her number one priority is to produce sales leads. Through well designed inbound marketing plans, a marketer can produce a high quantity of leads provided the plan includes compelling calls-to-actions.
The problem many marketing executives encounter is producing leads that Sales will accept as viable. Often the Sales team rejects leads produced by Marketing. As a result many Marketing and Sales departments collaborate to implement a lead scoring system to agree on which leads are considered A or B based on mutually agreed upon criteria. B leads go into a nurturing process which can someday convert them to A leads.
Attracting More “A” Leads
Often the people marketers attract through calls-to-action are B leads because they are not ready to buy. They may be a general fit, but they are in the early phase of their search for a solution provider in your field. They are just gathering information about you and your competitors. Perhaps they will download your white papers, but they may not be willing to engage in a sales conversation yet because they’re still in a fact-finding or research phase.
A prospect can read your website and blog content to determine if your offering is likely to be a functional fit. But, the #1 piece of information your prospect wants to know before engaging in sales conversation is if your offering is priced in their budget.
In most cases it is NOT wise to publish your pricing model. But, for some marketers in some industries it would be wise to offer self service budgetary pricing as a call-to-action.
I recently co-hosted a webinar with Dale Underwood, CEO of EchoQuote and Tony Gonzales, Sales Director at Federal Appliance, a successful user of this lead generation technique. Below is the entire webinar recording. If you are a Marketing or Sales executive responsible for lead generation in a B2B selling environment, this webinar will be worthwhile. Click the image below to launch the webinar recording.
I should point out this technique is not a fit in all industries. It fits best if your salesforce is specialized, selling complex B2B offerings (products or services) and your sell cycles are 30 days or longer. Sample good fit industries include hardware, software, equipment, some business services.
B2B sellers that fit this lead generation technique prosper by generating leads that are approved by Sales. The result is more A leads because Sales is actively involved in approving the self service budgetary quote request. Below is a sample call-to-action used on a client’s website.
After you view this webinar, if you think this is a fit, I encourage you to start a trial. It’s easy and hassle free.
