How to Follow Up With B2B Leads to Increase Sales
You don’t hear B2B lead generation being lumped under the customer experience umbrella much, but that needs to change! Content that supports inbound lead generation is likely the first experience a person has with your company and brand. Whether that experience is good or bad will determine if they stick around or if they head off in search of another business that offers more value.
When your customer experience is amazing from the get go (ie. in your awareness, lead generation, or customer acquisition stages), you’ll spend less time and effort finding and converting leads since you’ve proven the quality of your service even before someone is a paying customer.
Inbound B2B lead generation is such a hot topic when you’re focused on growing a business. Why? When someone comes to you (whether in person or digitally) and indicates interest in any way, they have done the hard work for you and are more likely to close than a cold, outbound lead. Whether you are generating leads through content or social media marketing your sales and marketing team should always be focused on how quickly to follow up with inbound leads.
Methods of generating inbound B2B leads
We recommend incorporating a variety of follow-up methods below into your strategy. A multichannel follow-up and lead generation strategy will ensure you’re reaching your audience in multiple places rather than sticking all your eggs in one basket.
1. Content Marketing
Content marketing is more than just putting some words together, publishing a blog post, and crossing your fingers that an inbound lead will magically appear. In order to generate high quality inbound leads, the information on your website needs to have massive value that makes a person want to hand over their name and email. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great way to attract people to your website while they are actively searching the topic in their search engine.
2. Organic Social Media Campaigns
Consistently share high quality content on your company’s social media accounts, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and any other platform your potential customers are active on. This is a great way to generate inbound leads along with developing a community and engaging with your potential and current customers. Make sure you have a call to action in our posts to ensure you push viewers to complete the action (commenting, page view, form fill, etc.) that you want them to.
3. Paid Social Media Campaigns
Paid social media campaigns are a great way to engage with your potential customers in a more targeted way, 24 hours a day. Unlike organic social media, with paid campaigns you’re able to use a wide range of targeting so that your marketing budget is only being used to show ads to people who could actually be interested in your product or service.
Some examples of audience targeting include demographic, custom audience list, and retargeting those that visited a specific website or page.
4. Email Marketing
Because only about 4% of website visitors are ready to buy at that moment, email marketing is essential to nurture your inbound leads to the point where they raise their hand for a sales call. We recommend including a call to action to receive a specific piece of content to entice your prospect into giving you their name and email for you to contact them.
5. Podcasting
Podcasts are on the rise and for good reason! Not only do listeners get to feel more connected to you since they can hear your voice, they can also listen at their convenience! With busy schedules being the norm these days, allowing your audience the freedom to take in your content whenever and wherever, from cleaning their house to driving to work, will increase their willingness to stick around.
6. Video
Video marketing is another growing type of content for lead generation, like podcasting, because you can develop a deeper connection with your audience. They can physically watch and listen to you explain and teach them everything about your area of expertise!
How quickly to follow up with inbound leads
Knowing how quickly to follow up with inbound leads can really make or break your ability to grow your business. Based on research, our lead generation experts at Incept recommend following up with your leads within the first 5 minutes of form submission. At the very least, you should always respond to a lead within 24 hours.
Whether your sales team performs the lead follow up calls or you have a team responding to inbound leads and appointment setting for your sales team, responding as quickly as possible will increase the connection rate. After all, if someone is raising their hand for help, getting back to them as quickly as possible will only impress them even more!
Below are some stats on lead generation to help guide your strategy moving forward:
According to Forbes, contact rates decrease 100x and qualification by 21x after 5 minutes
Your inside sales rep is then about 3000x less likely to make contact if lead follow-up occurs 5 hours after lead submission
55% of companies that have grown by a minimum of 40% in the last three years state that cold calling is far from dead (PS - we can help you with cold calling lead generation and appointment setting!)
How to respond to inbound leads
There are a variety of ways to follow up and respond to inbound leads depending on how qualified the lead is:
Follow up with a call
For all highly qualified leads - those that have indicated they want more information on doing business with you - a phone call is the best method to get in touch. Phone calls allow your team to quickly connect with the lead and show how serious you are about gaining their business. On your forms, always include a field for someone to leave their phone number so your sales team, or outsourced partner, can respond quickly and in a personal way.
Follow up with an email
Email is the most common way of following up with leads and there are some times when it’s a better method than a phone call. Oftentimes, when someone fills out a form on your website for a piece of downloadable content, an email follow-up is the best and most preferred form of contact. Because the lead didn’t specifically state that they want more information about working with you, they will likely take a little more nurturing than someone who filled out a “Let’s Talk” form and will likely see an immediate sales phone call a bit pushy. However, since they are already familiar with your brand, sending them a warm follow-up email can help add more value and build the relationship toward a sales call.
Follow up on Social Media/LinkedIn
When using social media to connect with prospects or potential customers, we always recommend using LinkedIn for your outreach. This is because it’s already set up to be a platform for business leaders to connect and help each other. While Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are great places to give free value to your audience, they aren’t the best places to begin cultivating a business relationship one-on-one. If you sent an email to an inbound lead and notice they haven’t responded or even opened your email in a few days, reaching out with a personalized message on LinkedIn with the guide they intended to download is a great way to reach out and offer value.
In Short: Don’t let your leads die before you even follow-up with them
Following up with warm leads is a critical step in any business’ sales process. If you don’t have the time to manage or ability to hire an inside sales team to follow up or set appointments, Incept is always here to help. We have an entire team of outsourced inside sales reps to assist your sales goals.
ABOUT INCEPT
Incept is an outsourced call center service that brings true conversational marketing back to customer experience. Our team of customer service representatives and experts partner with your team to improve the outcome of customer interactions and satisfaction, promote and protect your brand, and accelerate growth.
We’ve worked with some of the largest brands in the world to develop CX campaigns with one main goal - strengthen relationships at every touch point. From inbound phone calls and technical support, to organic and paid social media campaigns, to live chat, Incept is one of the best call center outsourcing vendors to assist all your CX and lead generation needs.
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