18 B2B solutions to generate qualified leads without staying up all night

Finding qualified leads has become the perpetual Holy Grail. Every company is looking for a solution to generate prospects with high sales potential. In B2B prospecting, the sales cycle remains long to transform a contact into a qualified contact, then into a prospect and finally into a customer.

To be sure of saving time, some companies concentrate on buying qualified leads. Others adopt a different strategy and different means of qualifying a sales lead: appvizer details them for you, and shows you which sales-oriented marketing platforms are ready to adapt to your criteria and needs.

Did you say quality and performance? We thought so.

Here's what we have to say:

See all software Lead Generation

What is a qualified lead?

Definition of a lead

A lead is a prospect, a potential customer. It is a contact with a sales potential (or not) to be determined.

This person is simply a sales lead to be observed: the aim is to obtain information about this contact in order to assess the degree of opportunity with this lead, and to qualify their purchasing intentions.

Example:
A visitor to your website is a reader.
If they leave their details to subscribe to your newsletter, they become a lead.
In marketing terms, you don't yet know their degree of maturity for making a purchase.
You don't have enough information to determine at what stage they are in the buying process: understanding, identifying the benefits, price, product choice, ready to buy.

Definition of lead marketing: the qualified prospect

A qualified lead is a contact for whom marketing has identified sales potential, known intentions and a context close to or far from the sale.

The lead qualification stage is handled by marketing.

At each stage of the qualification process, where the prospect becomes increasingly qualified, marketing monitors the degree of maturation of the qualified prospect to bring them to the final stage: making an appointment, or a sales proposal.

Lead qualification criteria

An unqualified lead becomes a qualified lead when marketing obtains, for example :

• the prospect's age,the prospect's job title,
• their purchasing power,
• contact details,
• the company's position in its market,
• signals about the company's development,
• information about the prospect's needs,
• the budget range allocated to satisfy them,
• their expectations of your service or product,
• the prospect's choice of one of the packages you offer, etc.

The sales lead

Once the leads have been qualified, only the hottest prospects, i.e. those for which marketing has identified a state with real sales potential, are passed on to the sales team.

The sales people are responsible for making appointments and closing the sale (finalising and signing), using the advanced knowledge provided by marketing, such as the needs of their customers.

Also known as a sales lead or business opportunity contact, a qualified lead is defined according to the various criteria mentioned above.

Why is it important to qualify BtoB contacts?

By aligning marketing with sales, a company gains in productivity:

• marketing qualifies contacts with sales potential,
• marketing nurtures leads until they are ripe for purchase,
• sales people focus only on the most promising prospects,
• sales staff have valuable data with which to persuade and personalise their offer,
• the company doesn't waste time prospecting contacts who aren't interested in what it has to offer.

Qualified lead generation: the current situation

Objectives of lead management

According to the Companeo B2B Lead Barometer (2017 edition), the priority of decision-makers (general management, marketing management, sales management and communications management) is to generate quality leads.

By this we mean that the qualification of contacts is the major issue for all managers:

• 90% of decision-makers want to increase quality,
• 72% want to increase volume,
• 70% want to reduce the cost of a qualified lead.

Evaluation criteria for measuring the effectiveness of your actions

How do you evaluate your qualified lead generation actions?

The 2016 barometer of B2B decision-makers, Enterprise@iProspect and Infopro Digital reveals the following practices:

• 42% of respondents evaluate the success of their actions by the increase in the number of appointments made,
• 57% believe that their actions are measured in terms of sales generated,
• 71% target prescribers and users involved in the decision-making process.

1 in 2 B2B marketing decision-makers segment their contact base and personalise their messages

Source: B2B decision-maker barometer, Enterprise@iProspect and Infopro Digital, 2016

Difficulties encountered in finding qualified prospects

• for 88% of decision-makers, the poor quality of leads is an obstacle; contacts have very little or no information;
• for 48% of managers, the company does not have sufficient skills or internal resources to produce quality content to attract prospects;
• for 46% of respondents, the organisation lacks the human resources to handle leads.

2 important lessons for generating qualified leads

To ensure that sales staff can focus their energy on qualified leads and that the company makes a return on the cost of its leads, there are 2 essential criteria to bear in mind:

• Criterion no. 1: it is necessary to identify all the stakeholders in the purchasing decision process,
• Criterion 2: it is essential to identify the concerns and needs of each profile in order to send the right message to the right person at the right time.

Let's weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of prospecting with or without software, and see which solution is best suited to qualifying your B2B contacts in your competitive context.

4 ways to find prospects without software

Solution no. 1: cold calling (laughs)

Some companies try to find qualified leads by making cold calls.

The time and energy spent by sales staff is phenomenal and a source of daily stress.

It's a proven fact that salespeople don't like prospecting over the phone: this old-fashioned technique of qualifying contacts is counter-productive.

Solution No. 2: Participate in networkings and events

For self-employed consultants or local VSEs, professional associations and local events are a way of finding customers.

Relationships and word-of-mouth are of the utmost importance here: it often takes a considerable amount of time before trust and closeness are established.

It's worth noting, however, that the DCF, the Dirigeants Commerciaux de France network, for example, brings together local branches through which sales managers and executives put in place initiatives to promote best practice among SMEs and SMIs.

Another recent initiative is the launch in 2018 of Linkedin Local, networking evenings with a human touch, where professionals can meet and get to know each other.

Solution 3: Exhibit and give a talk at a B2B trade show

The E-marketing 2018 trade show, for example, is a must for meeting digital marketing professionals: it's an opportunity for many companies (such as software publishers) to exhibit and seize opportunities.

More than 15,000 qualified professionals in the field of digital marketing will be gathered in one place in Paris on 10, 11 and 12 April 2018!

Solution No. 4: Get recommendations from your customers

Your best publicity: your satisfied customers. In addition to a testimonial on your website, ask your satisfied customers to talk about your excellent services around them: entrepreneurs know other entrepreneurs, who are themselves encountering the same problems and are therefore likely to be interested in your services.

4 intermediate tools for targeted prospecting

Solution no. 5: buying qualified leads (really?)

This is not the most recommended method, because you need to remain vigilant and be very clear about your selection criteria. In some cases, the leads generated are fake or of inferior quality.

However, many companies such as Edilead, Efficonex and Timeone offer to buy qualified leads: these companies sell the contacts you want to reach.

Our advice: pay attention to quality if you want to go down this route (clean, up-to-date database, volume of contacts, compliance with current legislation, etc.). Also assess the return on your investment.

Solution no. 6: the affiliation campaign

The principle and benefits of affiliation

To give a simple definition of affiliation : a company offers to pay a blogger per lead, for example. How it works: the blog owner publishes an article promoting your products or offer and encourages people to click on a link to your sales page.

As an affiliate, you need to target B2B sites that specialise in your subject area to ensure that you are reaching the right audience. The affiliate is then the blogger.

A serious affiliation platform: Advibe

The Advibe affiliation platform is particularly popular with web marketing agencies wishing to manage large volumes.

Advibe offers a number of advantages that appeal to companies looking for a management platform that can be customised and configured to manage a variety of revenue sources, such as clicks, double-clicks, CPL, etc.

Video overview of the Advibe affiliation platform:

Solution 7: Use targeted advertising

How targeted advertising works

Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Twitter and Linkedin ads are all ways of finding leads through online advertising.

This type of advertising is displayed if the Internet user's profile matches the targeting criteria defined beforehand. Visit the various ad management platforms for these networks.

The 3 types of targeted advertising

• personalised advertising, known as classic advertising, is displayed when age, gender or location are detected;
• contextual advertising is displayed according to the type of text content consulted by the Internet user;
• behavioural advertising is displayed according to the behaviour of a web user over time, such as successive visits to a site, interactions or keyword searches.

Solution no. 8: survey users in your market

The approach to adopt

Organising an online survey to find prospects is instructive! By adopting a non-commercial approach and asking relevant questions, you are adopting a stance that reflects your concern to respond as effectively as possible to market demands.

You can :

• carry out market research
• understand user expectations,
• qualify prospects by different expectations
• target potential customers by sending them tailored content,
• save time by using specialised software to process your online survey.

Recommended software for your online survey: Drag'n Survey

Drag'n'Survey makes it easy to create and share your online questionnaire.

You can use pre-built, configurable templates to create and distribute your online survey, as well as quizzes.

You can share your report with password access, send the questionnaire by email, distribute it on social networks and display it on your website from the interface.

The results analysis function lets you take the necessary step back.

Discover the Drag'n'Survey tool in the video below:

4 inbound marketing levers to attract customers

Inbound marketing consists of bringing visitors to your website and then qualifying them using a variety of techniques.

The diagram below will help you to understand the stages in this process of generating qualified leads, which is the opposite of intrusive advertising.

Solution no. 9: Attract visitors through content and natural referencing

The principle of content marketing

This is the top of the funnel: you attract readers interested in your topic by publishing content on your blog that answers their questions and concerns.

This technique works if your content is optimised for search engine optimisation(SEO). This technique is called content marketing.

Software to use

• You can set up your blog using a CMS such as WordPress or Drupal.
• Tools such as Ranxplorer, Insight Yooda and Visiblis are essential for finding your keywords and working on the semantics of your blog posts.

Solution no. 10: Convert web users into qualified leads

The principle of lead nurturing

By offering, for example, premium content for download in exchange for an e-mail address or other information such as the name of your company, you begin to qualify a lead and gather precise information.

To help the prospect mature in the buying process, you need to gradually nurture them with content that will enable them to consider all the issues involved in making a purchase.

We take the opportunity to observe what they read and ask them for more information to help us advise them. This is known as lead nurturing.

Using the criteria you have defined, you then assign a score to each lead you collect - this is called lead scoring.

When the score is satisfactory, the lead is sent to the sales representative to make an appointment.

Software to use

Inbound marketing is based on the use of marketing automation tools: setting up landing pages or sales pages, sending emails, contact forms and so on.

Marketing automation software can be used to set up scenarios based on different profiles and different levels of maturity. It is essential to couple the software with an emailing solution such as Sarbacanne, Newsletter2GO or wewmanager, and a CRM for tracking leads and personalising messages.

Please note: Neocamino offers a global solution that enables small businesses and SMEs to have all their tools on a single platform. All-in-one inbound marketing.

Solution no. 11: Publish an expert article in an online magazine

Identify the B2B blogs and media that focus on your business sector. Readers are qualified prospects on the subject.

By publishing an article of use value in this type of medium, you can showcase your expertise and build trust, generating a first degree of proximity.

On appvizer magazine, we regularly publish articles by experts on specific subjects such as marketing, HR, payroll, tax, etc.

To find out more, contact us!

Solution 12: Linkedin and social selling

The success of the Social Selling Forum confirms the trend: the conversational aspects of Linkedin make it a widely used tool for finding and qualifying prospects.

Salespeople can seize a number of opportunities by adopting an inbound marketing approach:

• responding to an exchange by commenting on a post,
• contacting members of a professional group
• qualifying a company's decision-makers,
• observing the signals emitted by that company,
• publishing content that is highly attractive.

84% of CEOs use social networks to find out about a brand before making their purchasing decisions.

Source: B2B Marketing Barometer 2017 by Infopro Digital and iProspect

5 high-performance B2B approaches to sales qualification

Solution 13: Account Based Marketing (ABM)

Principle and advantages of Account Based Marketing

Account Based Marketing (ABM) involves one-to-one marketing focusing on strategic accounts.

The idea is to identify profiles with high sales potential at an early stage, to focus resources and efforts solely on these profiles, and to feed these selected profiles with hyper-personalised messages.

We "reverse" the inbound marketing funnel and start with the lead. The aim is to qualify what might trigger a purchase by providing the most personalised response.

A commercially qualified lead becomes a significant business opportunity, because it has high potential.

By concentrating its efforts on targeted key accounts, the company increases its sales in proportion to the importance of each key account.

Other advantages of Account Based Marketing

• high return on investment
• sales resources are not spread too thinly,
• personalised marketing,
• monitoring in the funnel is precise and can be evaluated,
• the sales cycle is shortened,
• marketing and sales are clearly aligned.

The technologies to use

To carry out a targeted, personalised B2B approach, you need a number of tools, some of which are complementary:

• a web tracking solution to identify the behaviour of leads on your website,
• software to identify profiles on Linkedin and other platforms,
• an intelligent, automated email prospecting solution,
• an intelligent platform for scanning the web and identifying business signals,
• a CRM tool to manage your database and ensure effective follow-up,

There are several technologies for qualifying high-potential B2B leads. Each SME needs to focus on those that best support it, depending on :

• its target customer profiles
• its sales cycle
• its business,
• its objectives
• its resources
• the competitive environment of its market.

Solution 14: B2B web tracking

Advantages and definition of web tracking

B2B web tracking is used in advertising and affiliation, but also to manage emailing campaigns, and above all to track visitors to a website, in particular by means of their IP addresses.

The aim is therefore to track visitors to your website, or more precisely their behaviour, in order to qualify leads in their purchasing process.

BtoB web tracking can be used, for example, to track Internet users who have opened an email, clicked on a link and visited your site.

This webmarketing technique also makes it possible to observe the pages visited on your site, to track a visitor in order to assess their path and maturity with regard to the purchase.

The aim is to identify what the visitor is really interested in, so as to optimise the sales tunnel and achieve the expected scoring.

The right tool: Visiblee

The Visiblee solution goes further than basic web tracking: it can identify anonymous visitors to a B2B website and the companies to which they belong.

Visiblee uses cutting-edge technology to cross-reference IP addresses, cookies and metadata with qualified web sources and databases.

The results: access to highly accurate commercial information, a powerful lead nurturing tool, automation processes and effective lead scoring.

Visiblee promises to open up a wealth of new business opportunities. Discover the tool in the video below:

Solution 15: Automated B2B prospecting by email

Principle and advantages

Imagine a B2B email prospecting platform that works in place of sales reps, automatically sending emails to leads to qualify the hottest prospects.

Imagine a solution that analyses the data in your CRM and compares it with a database of hundreds of thousands of qualified profiles.

Yes, it's possible: all you have to do is define your customer profiles in advance!

Recommended platform: Blacksales

Blacksales software is revolutionising the world of email prospecting: it does the work detailed above.

It also analyses Linkedin databases and contacts prospects by email, sending value-added messages to each recipient.

The solution includes a content library to fuel exchanges and provide high-quality lead nurturing.

The strengths of Blacksales :

• Invoicing is based on results. The company using the solution is debited when the prospect responds positively, based on the cost of the lead stopped;
• the Blacksales solution connects seamlessly with Salesforce Sakes Cloud CRM and other applications such as Pipedrive G Suite and Microsoft Office 365;
• sales reps focus on the hottest prospects!

Find out more about automated email prospecting in the video below:

Solution no. 16: Sales intelligence works for salespeople

How does sales intelligence work?

Sales intelligence is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to qualify B2B contacts.

This intelligence constantly scans the web on behalf of salespeople to qualify decision-makers, companies and the corresponding scoring.

This type of intelligence replaces the human being and saves on time-consuming tasks by automatically sorting the data.

In this way, sales staff can focus their efforts on the most qualified prospects.

Recommended platform: Bypath

Bypath supports salespeople at every stage of the B2B sales cycle by exploiting the Big Data available on the web.

The solution's algorithms digest millions of pieces of information in real time to deliver the most relevant data on the prospects that interest you.

Sales managers, business engineers or sales representatives can retrieve fresh data to update their CRM database, and benefit from the assistance of AI in their prospecting right through to closing.

Bypath also speeds up the social selling process.

Video overview of Bypath's capabilities:

Solution 17: Predictive lead scoring

The approach and how it works

This approach is also based on Sales Intelligence. Starting from your persona, your typical customer profile, artificial intelligence scans the web to detect corresponding companies and business signals, then classifies them in terms of opportunities.

The solution then scores the leads and notifies the sales rep when an opportunity has arisen.

This type of artificial intelligence learns from your use of the solution to generate increasingly relevant results (machine learning).

Recommended platform: Predict by Sparklane

SMEs with up to 50 employees can chase what they call digital lead marketing with serious performance using Sparklane's Predict solution.

The great strength of this platform is that it contextualises the lead: your sales representative adopts an advisory approach by providing the right arguments at the right time, to the right person.

Predict connects easily with CRM systems such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, so you can integrate the latest data published on the internet.

Watch a video to see what Predict can do for you:

Summary table of software for qualifying B2B leads

See all software Lead Generation

Solution 18: No CRM, no chocolate

All this targeted prospecting software brings you closer to making a sale by enabling you to better qualify your leads.

However, you mustn't forget to centralise your data in CRM software, which is a mandatory tool if only to ensure effective customer follow-up.

Software publishers have taken this essential point on board and allow you to connect their qualified lead generation solutions to a CRM.

To help you choose the right CRM, we refer you to our CRM compendiums and dedicated articles on Salesforce Sales Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics, Sellsy and many others...