Over the past few years, the lead generation process experienced one of the most significant changes in modern B2B history. The COVID-19 accelerated the shift to digital interactions, increasing buyer awareness and enabling decision-makers to rely on their efforts in search of a required solution.
Remote selling displaced physical interactions and formed new lead generation trends such as a data-based approach, omnichannel outreach, or automated interactions that swiftly became a norm of today’s B2B sales activities.
These are some of the hottest lead gen trends that you should keep your eyes on this year:
Intent Data
Data is king. And this type of data helps to uncover decision-makers that are actively looking for solutions to specific challenges they face.
Intent data is collected by third parties over time and can be used to identify the best candidates to buy your product or services. By focusing on customers already searching for a solution to a problem your product can solve, you elevate the lead generation process to the next level and start identifying hot leads more efficiently.
Account-Based Targeting
According to Gartner, a complex B2B solution involves over six decision-makers in a typical buying group. Working with multiple stakeholders makes it difficult to personalise your approach and requires considering the entire account when crafting an engagement strategy. Account-based marketing helps to overcome this challenge.
Sales Specialisation
With the continuous sophistication of a sales process, no single contributor can do all the sales-related tasks themselves. Prospecting, lead qualification, analysis, sales conversion and management are just some of the steps that require different talents and trained specialists.
Many new jobs appeared on the market to address the specialisation gap. For example, copywriters, campaign strategists, researchers, SDRs, BDRs and BDMs – all have different skills to master and roles to play.
Omnichannel Outreach
To start a business dialogue with the decision-maker you want, you need to use a communication channel that person prefers. With the rise of remote human interactions and the takeover of digital communication, outreach has to take place on different channels to increase the chances of converting a prospect into a qualified lead.
To orchestrate a holistic omnichannel experience for your prospects and your salespeople, you need to create a consistent message across all communication touchpoints and deliver it using a sales cadence tool.
Sales Outsourcing
To optimise sales activation costs and make their in-house teams more productive many companies are looking for a way to outsource different parts of the sales generation process. For example, outsourcing your lead generation function could be a smart option if you have limited resources for hiring, training, managing and retaining an in-house BDR team. By entrusting the job to an experienced team with industry-specific expertise and a proven track record, you attain lower lead acquisition costs and higher conversion results to fuel the pipeline.
Upgrade your lead generation process
The lead generation future is predicted to be multi-channel, data-driven, highly dependent on automation and orchestrated with an emphasis on the client’s needs. In addition, remote work and digital selling are becoming a new norm, forcing companies that survived the pandemic to adapt to the new rules. You can turn your pipeline generation process into your sales team’s most vital asset by joining forces with Illicium.