While it is essential to have a B2B lead generation strategy in place, there is no point of it if the strategy just sits in your inbox (or top drawer). Many companies have the best intentions of conductin lead generation campaigns and do all the right things in terms of psyching up their sales teams, setting new sales goals and maybe sprucing up their website, but that is simply not enough if you are serious about lead generation.

The first area that needs addressing is sales and marketing objectives. Some examples include;

• Increasing your sales pipeline with qualified leads
• Developing cross/up-selling opportunities with existing customers 
• Nurture programs for prospective targets and existing customers to cultivate them into a sales ready position
• Follow-up on prospects and customers that have stalled during the sales process and have not gone the entire way to a sale
• Clean database
• Set up marketing campaigns to increase the size and depth of the database
• Increase the number of sign-ups to webinars

This list can be as big or small as you require, but it needs to be thorough and representative of your requirements. Once you have a sales and marketing strategy in place that leads into a secondary B2B lead generation strategy, it's time to execute.

Remember, that much of the lead generation cycle is completed by your marketing team. With B2B lead generation, it is a simple cadence, but it needs to be followed.

Lead Capture

How is your business capturing leads? What campaigns are you executing to deliver leads to your sales team. Many company websites do not have the right data capture opportunities on their websites to build a meaningful database. Ensure that your website has call-to-action points throughout without being spammy in the process. When capturing details, ensure that your forms are clean, clear to understand and have fields that are compulsory to avoid spam bots.

Lead Magnets

This step is critical and if you get it wrong, you may push your market away. Lead magnets are ways in which you attract stickiness to your brand by downloading valueable information such as a whitepaper, brochure, ebooks, webinar registration or having a free trial of your services or a demonstration. 

Businesses use lead magnets such as email opt-ins, subscriptions, and social media follows to ascertain a sign of interest from their site's visitors.

Landing Pages

There are many ways to set up a landing page, but it's important to ensure that your landing page leads your prospect closer to a sale. To arrive at a landing page, someone has to click on something - an advertisement, click through on an email marketing campaign, "read more" etc.

Landing pages serve the two-way purpose of capturing leads and warming up potential customers. Both of these are essential stepping-stones before moving a customer further down your sales funnel. Ensure that your landing page has enough information to have your prospect or customer want to learn more, but not too much that they don't need to contact you or take the next action point.

Landing pages must be on-brand, consistent messaging with all other marketing assets and clearly communicate your UVP (Unique Value Proposition). It must also ensure that there is one last action to occur and that is talk to your sales team.

Executing a B2B lead generation strategy is all about discipline, understanding your customer better, and responding to their needs and inquisitive nature.