Things to do after your lead generation software has been set-up

Many people believe that lead generation software will take away all their miseries and generate not only leads, but flesh-and-blood customers as well. This is an ‘alternative fact’ as they nowadays state everything that takes place in an alternative Universe.  Reality is, that unless you have a super, almost self-selling product or service that converts leads into customers, you will have to have a sales plan for what you will do, once you identified your leads from a lead generation software, such as Leadberry. This post aims to give you an actionable To Do list of such things.

Lets first clarify what a lead generation software will do for you.

• You need to have a customer friendly, content-rich and content marketing based website that attracts visitors in a topic they need more information, in order to solve a relevant issue in their lives. Your offer comes in only later for them. So make sure you cater to their information needs and pain points, and not only pushing your own agenda in the form of a product or service.
• A lead generation software can be set-up quite easily, connecting with your website and your Google Analytics account.
• Once up and running, the lead generation software will decode the IP addresses of your visitors and transform them into company names with real people’s real contact details that it gathers from various databases in the background.

That is all a lead generation tool does.  No small feat, however, without follow-up action from your sales team (or yourself if you are a solopreneur), magic won’t happen.

What you need to do with your leads:

• Firstly, you need to define your real target audience. It isn’t ‘everyone with two ears’, but rather think of designing a value proposition that will do certain jobs for your customers with specific pains, and with specific (expected and wished for) gains YOU can cater for best.  See, it becomes much easier to serve customers I want to work with than fend off people who shouldn’t become my customers.  Frustrating for them, frustrating for me.
• Second, assuming you do have the right ballpark of customers as leads, you need to see who you might know personally at a given company. Leadberry identifies LinkedIn contacts and company email addresses of your leads, among other things. Your team will need to go after personal connections you might know.
  Don’t know the right person, but have an alternative connection at a given company? Fine, drop them an email and ask for the right person’s contact details! See an email address and know a different person’s name whose email address needs to be known to get in touch with? Easy: very likely, company email addresses follow a single-track logic and you can easily put in the known real name into the same email address format and reach the right person for a first meeting.
• Have a fear of cold-calling people based on your lead generation software? Don’t! In fact most people will be quite happy to have a call from a company they were interested in explain them things they wanted to know in more detail. Afraid of the ‘Big Brother watching’ effect – e.g. what will people think of you if you use such tools? Lead generation software is nothing James Bondish, rather a clever and legal way to get two parties interested in the same thing get to know each other.  In fact, be proud of your clever software and tell people about it. There are so many people wanting to connect with the right customers, that it’s only logical to use something that helps you with your intentions.  You aren’t watching their private lives, rather your own website and what your visitor was interested in particular. In a nutshell, lead generation software helps you warm up your cold calls and you are already one step further in being able to identify what interests your leads.
• Lead generation software helps you gather phone numbers – but it will not dial the number for you – you need to make the call.
• Lead generation software will identify everyone from that company known to mankind with an email address – but it will be you writing that email to that person. Cool feature: the title/job role of all contacts found on LinkedIn is also known, so use it to your advantage!

Extra tip:

Don’t send everyone the same offer letter: try and do your homework about each lead company. Find out their major issues, ask for a brief meeting to understand their real needs, the specific situation they are in. What job do they need to get done that you could help with? Even though you have a core product or service offering, you can tailor it to each lead’s business and that will do wonders in terms of converting your lead to a real customer.

Further benefits of using a lead generation software:

• If you meet with a potential B2B customer, you can identify whether or not they visited your website already. If yes, you can also find out which page they looked at, so you can already talk about those and pretend to be a Mentalist. You will be able to ‘read’ their thoughts, which will impress them (alternatively, just say you saw they were interested in one of your services).
• Even for existing customers, lead generation software enables you to see what they were interested in recently on your website. It might be the case you have a new product or service they could be interested in. We mentioned in the beginning of this post the need for content-marketing.  Lead generation software also acts as a reality-check about your content’s X-factor: are people looking at one of your non-service related page with great interest, because it answers certain questions they have about a topic? Great, keep up the great work and source more content.  You can be sure they come back to you when they actually need a solution as well, instead of just information. 
• Make sure you have something that can be offered (e.g. sent) to your visitors completely free. Put together an eBook, a self-assessment questionnaire, some cool links that is of value for them. If you follow this advice, they will be inclined to sign-up to your site, and in exchange you get their email addresses that is of great value for you at a later stage.
• Using a lead generation software can also enhance your email database if you use it smartly. If you connect with people on LinkedIn (based on the leads), those email addresses can also be integrated into your CRM system and you can use it for email marketing later on.