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Leads are the foundation of your business growth. If you want to expand your customer base and increase your sales and profits, you’ll need a steady supply of new leads. Understanding how to generate quality leads for your business is just the first step of the process; from there, you’ll qualify, nurture, and convert leads. Businesses that do so successfully can grow significantly and are well positioned for success.
What Is a Lead?
A lead is an individual or organization who has expressed some sort of interest in your business. The lead has the potential to become a customer, and they may have demonstrated their interest in your business by visiting your website, signing up for a free trial, or submitting contact information in exchange for a piece of gated content, like an e-book or guide.
By generating and nurturing leads, your business can potentially convert them into paying customers, growing your customer base and increasing your revenue.
How to Generate Leads for Your Business
Lead generation, which is the process of engaging with and drawing in potential customers, is the foundation to your lead nurture and conversion processes. Effective lead generation can supply your marketing and sales teams with a steady stream of leads, helping to grow your business.
There are many ways to generate leads, so I’ve highlighted some of the most popular options that work for most businesses. Effective lead generation depends on providing your audience with value to foster a meaningful connection and build their interest in your business, and you’ll see that providing value is a common theme in these strategies.
Invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When you optimize your website for search engines, you can better drive potential customers to your site. By incorporating keywords that potential customers are likely to search for in your website content, you can position your business and products as being a solution. Creating blog or website content around those keywords and answering common questions potential customers are likely to have can help solve their problems while introducing them to your business.
Share Knowledge Through an Article or Blog
Related to the above strategy, write articles or blogs that offer real value to your potential customers. Use your specialized knowledge to solve a common problem, answer questions, or provide important “insider information” or insights that your potential customers would find interesting. Focus on creating quality pieces of content that readers are likely to engage with and share, rather than on simply posting lots of blogs.
Consider writing an article or blog for another business or another publication, too. By publishing content for another business that shares a similar target audience, you can expand your reach and generate new leads.
Host a Webinar
Webinars can be an excellent way to generate quality leads. Similar to blogs and articles, webinars allow you to share your knowledge and expertise with leads, but you can often do so in more depth with a webinar. You can also bring in other industry experts on panel webinars to enhance the value your audience receives. Require webinar attendees to submit their contact information to register, and you’ll build a pipeline of leads.
Engage With Leads on Social Media
Social media is also an effective way to generate leads. When you establish an active social media presence for your business, you can reach leads in several ways: By posting engaging and informative content, leads may interact with your posts, and you can respond to comments and start to build relationships. Social media ads can also reach a highly targeted audience, driving leads to your site, encouraging them to sign up for webinars, and more.
Generate Referrals From Current Customers
Your current customers are a valuable source of leads, too. Your customers likely have friends or connections who would also be interested in your business and your products or services. Establish a referral program to incentivize your customers to refer others to your business. In exchange, offer your customers discounts or rewards for their referrals.
How to Qualify Leads
Leads aren’t all the same quality, meaning some leads are more likely to convert than others. Qualifying leads refers to the process of determining which leads most closely align with your ideal customer profile and are therefore most likely to convert into customers. Lead qualification is important because it allows you to focus your nurturing efforts and resources on the highest quality leads. In doing so, you can increase your conversion rate and use your time and financial resources wisely.
As you generate and collect leads, you’ll need to qualify them through several steps. To do so effectively, make sure that you’re collecting and organizing leads in a CRM.
Create an Ideal Customer Profile
You’ll need to build a profile of your ideal customer, which will help you identify which leads are strongest. Your ideal customer profile can also inform and better focus your marketing efforts, so it’s worth investing time in thoroughly developing the profile.
To create an ideal customer profile, outline the features of your most valuable customers, including their demographics, pain points, goals, industry, and more. If you’re running a B2B company, then details like the customer’s business revenue and position are also important. Record all of this information; you’ll reference it during the lead qualification process.
Determine the Criteria You’ll Use to Score Leads
Work with your analytics and sales team to identify the criteria that are most important in valuable leads. Your goal is to create a checklist outlining these criteria, so you can go down the list and determine the lead’s value. The criteria you use will be unique to your business and your customers, but consider looking at features like:
- Geographic location.
- Engagement with your social media pages.
- The number of times they’ve visited your website.
- Whether they’ve downloaded any of your content.
- Whether they’ve been referred by a current customer.
- Any conversations they’ve had with your sales team.
- Whether they’ve requested additional information or a demo of a product or service.
Research Leads
Depending on your business structure and industry, researching leads may be an important part of the qualification process. It’s more common for B2B businesses to research leads, including looking for details such as their business structure, revenue, and their purchasing or decision-making authority within their business. The information you learn can better inform your lead qualification.
Contact Leads and Evaluate
When your sales team contacts the leads, those initial conversations can provide valuable information about each lead’s quality. Many B2B businesses hold initial phone conversations, giving your team a chance to ask questions about a lead’s pain points, budget, experience with your competition, and where in the buying process they are. All of that information can inform your evaluation of the lead quality, and should be recorded in your CRM.
Qualify Your Leads
Once you’ve gathered information on your leads, evaluate them using the scoring criteria you identified. You’ll also want to incorporate any notes from your team’s initial conversation with the leads. Leads that meet more of your criteria are your higher-quality leads and should be prioritized and moved along in your nurture funnel to receive personalized interactions. Lower-quality leads are of less priority, and these should receive more automated, less personalized interactions.
How to Nurture Leads
By nurturing leads, you can provide them with more information about your business, build important relationships with them, and eventually convert them into customers. The lead nurture process looks different for every business, but you can build your nurture process around these best practices:
Plan Your Nurture Funnel
Plan out what your lead nurture process will consist of, including the communication channels you’ll use, the offers you’ll make, the type and timing of your messaging, and your lead nurture campaign goal.
Personalize Your Interactions
Make your interactions with engaged, quality leads as personal as possible. Take detailed notes about your interactions with them and use the information you learn to customize your future interactions. Personalizing your content and messaging can not only make it more meaningful and memorable for leads, but also demonstrates that you’re listening to what they’re sharing during conversations and showing you’re able to meet their specific needs.
Use Automation
While your quality leads require personalized interactions whenever possible, you can still nurture lower-quality leads by using automation. Schedule emails containing pre-written messaging and content to go out to these leads at designated intervals. While not as powerful as a personalized nurture campaign, automated funnels can still potentially nurture leads and may generate some conversions.
Use A/B Testing
Continuously use A/B testing to improve your lead nurture efforts. A/B test each part of your funnel, like your offer language or the emails sharing your new blog post. Don’t be afraid to try out new techniques, too, and see if they can improve your nurture funnel.
How to Convert Leads
Your lead nurture funnel helps you learn more about your leads while also building your leads’ familiarity and connection with your business. These steps can help you with your ultimate goal at the end of the funnel, which is to convert leads.
Try Different Conversion Tactics
Lead conversion is a bit of an art, so try out different conversion techniques. Encourage your sales team to suggest new tactics based on their conversations with leads and what they think the leads want or need most. A new tactic could revitalize your lead conversion process.
Make Appealing Offers
An irresistible offer can help convert leads. Offer a discount, a free add-on, a heavily discounted package, or another incentive to sweeten the deal. Consider having a second, even more enticing offer that you can provide if your initial offer isn’t quite enticing enough to convert a lead.
SQL vs. MQL vs. Prospect
The terms prospect, Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), and Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) all describe various phases of a lead’s progression through the sales process. Understanding how these terms are linked can help you tailor your approach to each lead to increase your chances of conversion.
| Prospect | MQL | SQL | |
| Stage of the lead qualification process | Early | Early/mid | Mid |
| Qualification | A prospect is a lead that your team has qualified; you’ll know who they are, their role, and their business. | An MQL is a lead who has engaged with your content, such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading a piece of gated content. | A SQL is an MQL who has been qualified by your team, based on more than just their actions on your website. Additional qualifications might be based on information like their pain points and professional role. |
| Which businesses use this term | “Prospect” is commonly used by sales-oriented businesses. | Marketing-oriented businesses commonly use this term. | Marketing-oriented businesses commonly use this term. |
The Marketing/Sales Conflict: Should We Stop Generating Leads That Aren’t Sales-Qualified?
Sales-qualified leads are highly desirable leads, since your team has identified features that indicate they’re ideal for your business. Still, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t generate leads that aren’t sales-qualified leads. For example, a marketing qualified lead, which has engaged with your content, has demonstrated interest in your business. With proper nurturing, that lead could turn into a sales-qualified lead, and then ultimately convert into a sale. Develop a nurture strategy that prioritizes your sales-qualified leads, but don’t ignore your other leads, which could become more qualified.
Key Takeaways
Leads are key to growing your business, expanding your customer base, and increasing profits. Refining your lead generation, qualification, and nurturing processes can help you to drive sales and convert leads into new customers. Testing and continuously improving these processes will help maximize your business and revenue growth.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What qualifies as a good lead in marketing?
A good lead is a lead that closely aligns with your ideal customer profile. For example, a lead that shares key demographics, geography, income, pain points, and interests with your current top customers would be considered a good lead that is likely to convert into a customer.
What is scoring?
Lead scoring is a process that helps businesses to evaluate the quality of their leads and determine which ones to prioritize in the lead nurture process. In scoring leads, businesses create formulas that allow them to assign numerical values to each lead. Then, businesses can rank the leads from the highest score to the lowest score, with the highest-scoring leads being the most likely to convert.
How do I create an effective lead nurturing email sequence?
To create an effective lead nurturing email sequence, keep things simple: Focus on one topic or idea per email, and address your leads’ pain points or interests. Keep the emails short and format them so they’re inviting and easy to read. Personalize them as much as possible, and use A/B testing to improve your email performance.
What tools can help me track and analyze lead behavior?
There’s no shortage of tools that can help you track and analyze lead behavior, including CRMs, social media analytics, Google Analytics, and various marketing automation and analytics platforms. To get the most value out of the tools you use, look for tools that offer plenty of customization options, which will allow you to tailor their use to track and analyze the data that matters most to your business.
How do small businesses generate quality leads?
When it comes to generating quality leads, small businesses can stand out from the competition by leveraging their brand stories and the personal connections they’re able to form with their audience. Referrals from current customers are a valuable source of leads, but small businesses can also leverage content marketing, performance-based display advertising, social media, and SEO to generate quality leads.
