B2B lead generation companies create sales leads for businesses hoping to provide products or services for other businesses. B2B (business to business) sales landscapes can be difficult to break into.Usually, the decision maker within a company has an army of “gatekeepers” between herself or himself and the seller, whose role is to deflect any sales pitch not deemed to be immediately appropriate.
A lead generation company gets its business by cutting out the gatekeeper stage of the business to business sales process or trying to. This process is started by compiling a list of people, who have agreed to receive marketing. By being contacted and verbally opting into communications from a lead generation company, subscriber bases are built up over time, allowing such companies to develop a highly targeted audience to take messages to.
Should respondents decide to request, interact or download any messages sent from the B2B lead generation companies, they have achieved a ‘double opt-in’ and can sell their contact details onto the third party marketer – the client company. This is now a lead. Normally, this is done in a package environment, in which the client company is given the opportunity to make first contact with the sales leads whilst still operating inside the remit of the lead generation company.
The most common way for this to be done is by incorporating the marketing company’s sales message or information into a bulletin or questionnaire format, designed to slip past the decision maker’s guard and effectively promote a first contact that is not overtly geared towards selling.
The marketer might create a whitepaper, for example, which is intended to deliver genuinely useful information to the decision maker. This information might take any guise the marketer sees fit as well as which is appropriate to the recipient. Often, simple industry news is enough to separate the sales leads from the sales prospects.
A sales prospect is the next step in the evolution of the consumer. All consumers start life (according to the terms recognised by the marketing and advertising industries) as sales leads.They become sales prospects when they begin to respond to marketing information and they finally become consumers when they move to a purchasing decision.
For marketing of any kind to have a traceable effect, the marketer needs to be able to attach specific purchasing decisions to identifiable marketing drives. Because of this, traditional methods for translating sales leads into sales prospects have been quite aggressive. Follow up calls, which aim atfinding out if the purchasing lead is genuinely likely to become a prospectas well as importantly, whether the lead has the money required to translate that prospect into realitymight leave the lead feeling badgered or harassed.
As a result, gentler forms of lead based marketing are beginning to evolve, in which the lead is effectively required to make contact on his or her terms before he or she is seen as a prospect.