There are plenty of challenges to keep you on your toes as the CEO of a thriving tech or SaaS business. Successfully selling your product or SaaS service is the ultimate goal, but there’s a lot more to mull over than just the endgame. Before your international sales representatives can ask a customer to sign on the dotted line, you need to attract them to your business and your product or service. There are three steps to gaining the confidence and trust of prospective customers before the sales stage:
What will make your B2B lead generation team and business lead strategy stand out from the competition and attract exactly your ideal customer profile? They may be interested in what you have to offer, and perhaps already expressed that via landing pages on your organization’s website, but there’s a lot of competition involved, and you need to stand out from the crowd and prove that you are the best choice with the best-fit product.
Generating leads is probably the most crucial part of building your business, and can be especially problematic if you’re a startup, or perhaps a scale-up looking at the bigger picture of expansion and selling in Europe. 61% of marketers say that lead generation is their number one challenge, says Hubspot in their State of Marketing Trends Report 2022.
Let’s look at three business lead generation strategies you could use, also how useful you might find outsourced business lead generation services from an outsourced sales agency.
These are not simply techniques for you to put into operation in order to increase the number of leads, but also to refine the quality of those leads — the real key to recurring revenue and return on investment (ROI) — with business lead generation strategies and outsourced strategies that assist growth, instead of guesswork.
Your product or service must meet a common need and be the best-fit and sought-after solution to that common problem. You need to be able to identify prospective customers and make them aware of this new product or service that will answer their problems. This really drives lead generation, especially in the SaaS world.
You’re offering a solution, instead of going straight to a hard-sell approach. So show as well as tell. Get out there, whether that’s to a virtual or an actual event, and show the world your solution. Or make it personal. Offer and arrange free face-to-face video consultations with your prospective buyers. That says you’re serious, and will build trust, an important part of business lead generation. Trust builds relationships and fills your sales funnel with the most serious and best quality leads.
We can never say this often enough. Measuring progress is everything. You have to leverage data in order to really know — and continuously improve — your lead generation strategy. Big data management is essential to any successful international lead generation strategy.
Track, measure and adjust where necessary your business lead generation strategy’s key performance indicators (KPIs) in the following areas:
Create lead magnets for this 'awareness of your brand' stage. Stage lead magnets will assist in qualifying your buyers for suitability. A tool or a simple few questions that will firstly assess their problems and secondly show them how your product is the solution they need.
We mentioned the usefulness of a free consultation — perhaps one that incorporates a custom-built demonstration as well. This shows the buyer you are serious and that you're ready to invest time in them, thus building trust. You're Including a real deliverable and giving them something of real value — above and beyond what the closest competitor can offer them.
Sure, you’ll be growing your database of prospective buyers, and building an email list, but it’s one not just filled with any old names, but qualified ones. Always be ready to follow up with killer content, useful offers and/or take them straight to landing pages.
Don’t attempt to go to market with a targetless or one-size-fits-all business lead generation strategy. It just doesn’t work and you may lose face, damage your brand’s reputation, or be out of business altogether in no time.
A workable business lead generation strategy can be more difficult when starting out or scaling up to do business abroad. If direct marketing takes 12 points of contact to turn a contact into a sales-qualified lead (SQL) then you need to keep up to speed. Time is not a luxury you have when breaking onto a new market.
The right message needs to be communicated, to the right culture — and it’s about more than a different language. Local laws and customs are also communication, and it pays to get it right. It costs to get it wrong.
Move fast and with confidence, knowing that you are doing it the right way.
Using the services of an outsourced sales agency will go some way to ensure that, and provide you with seamless and qualified business lead generation and inside sales with the support of regionalized management teams. International sales representatives will pick up the baton and do what they do best — successfully sell SaaS all day long.
"Following a successful Series D funding round, we engaged Sales Force Europe to support our aggressive European growth plans by providing local language lead generation into 14 new markets. They were able to quickly provide native French, German, English and Spanish speakers to support us. Onboarding was fast and their team was almost immediately seen internally as just another department. One of the key benefits for us has been the direct access to their BDRs as well as the input strategically from the account manager allocated to us — I believe this has helped us significantly over-achieve our European lead gen targets with SFE. We are looking forward to a long-term partnership as we continue to grow across Europe,” said Theresa Woodiel, Director, account-based and integrated marketing of our client, cybersecurity business Deep Instinct.
Get in front of new prospects and close deals sooner, that remains the aim of a good and successful business lead generation strategy.
