The lead generation process is essential to growth. Without generating leads consistently – and most importantly, generating quality leads – there is little room for scalability. And by introducing a clear process to your lead generation, you’ll be able to generate more leads on a constant basis and with less effort. Win/win.

Let’s get into what a B2B lead generation process entails and how you can easily build a winning lead generation process.

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What is a lead generation process?

Simply put, lead generation is all about capturing potential customers’ interest in your products or services so that you can nurture them through the funnel and ultimately turn them into paying customers. Because of this, lead generation is extremely important. That means it shouldn’t be left to chance. In fact, it’s best to put together a clear process to follow. That way you can get new leads on a regular basis for as little extra effort as possible.

How to improve your lead generation process

Here’s how to set up your own lead generation process and what elements are essential to creating a winning lead gen process:

1: Strategize

The first step in creating or improving any process is to actually plan the strategy:

  • Who forms your target audience? The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be to create the type of content that gets them to convert, which means more leads generated.
  • What are your goals? What specifically do you want to achieve, and how does this align with your overall business goals?
  • How will you achieve your goals? Establish how you can reach each goal. Be sure to get detailed, listing out who will do what, and set clear deadlines.
  • Establish your platforms: How will you deliver your message and what channels will you be using?
  • Establish your content/incentives: What incentives will help you capture your target audience’s attention? Depending on the channel, you might need to use a different format. For example, on your blog, you could offer an e-book, while on your social channels, you might offer a discount.
  • How will you measure your results? You’ll have to continuously monitor your lead generation results so you can find out what works and what doesn’t and optimize your campaigns from there.

2: Align sales & marketing

Inbound lead generation is now all about digital. And that means it’s all about the content.

Social media, blogs, and other digital channels are all great sources of leads, which makes it very important to completely remove the divide between salespeople and marketing people.

Whether it’s lead generation, lead nurturing, or even making a sale, all the go-to-market departments need to collaborate in order to ensure maximum results.

Plus, marketing people need to know when they have a hot lead on their hands and need to call in someone from the sales team to further engage the potential customer and get them to convert.

So, what does aligning your marketing and sales strategies require? Put simply:

  • Close collaboration between sales and marketing. Marketing needs to know what to do in order to generate and nurture leads and when to call in someone from the sales department. They also need to know what strategies to implement in order to assist the sales department in reaching their goals.
  • A shared CRM tool so that all interactions with leads are properly recorded (and so that you can properly qualify your leads – which we’ll get to in a bit).

3: Conquer with content

As we discussed above, content is essential to a winning B2B lead generation process. This is what captures potential leads’ interest, what builds their trust, and what gets them to leave their contact information with you.

When planning your lead generation process, you also need to consider what type of content you will be creating. Thankfully, establishing your goals (AKA step one) should help you with this. Your goals will inform what content you should publish.

There are tons of content types that you can create for lead generation, like:

  • Blog posts: Create a blog on your website and publish new blog posts regularly so that potential leads can discover you via your content and keep coming back for more. Keep your cadence regular to keep them coming back for more.
  • How to guides/whitepapers: Your target audience is looking for content to help them achieve their own goals. Create how-to guides and whitepapers that they can download to generate quality leads.
  • Webinars and online courses: Hosting a webinar or online course will help you generate more high-quality leads. This is a big time investment on the leads’ part, and if you’re offering them enough value, you’re one step closer to getting them to buy from you.
  • Ebooks: Ebooks are still very popular and great lead generators. Plus, we’re not talking about writing the next great American novel here — they don’t have to be very long (even 30-40 pages is enough).
  • Videos: Videos are great for converting leads, but they’re also good for generating more of them in the first place. Use them on your blog, on your social channels, and on your landing pages. Basically, wherever you can. Videos can be promotional, educational, and anything in between — it’s up to you and whatever goals you’ve set.
  • Podcasts: Another very popular form of content, podcasts can help you reach a new audience and provide them with value.

Each piece of content you create and publish should take you one step closer to achieving your set goals.

4: Get contact info

Content helps you get people on your website, build their trust, and give them a reason to stick around. However, to actually generate leads, you need to give them the opportunity to share their contact information with you.

You can do this with:

  • Landing pages
  • Site-wide opt-in forms
  • Specific content downloads (targeted opt-in forms depending on the page they’re on)
  • Contact forms

And if they don’t leave their contact information (or you need more to qualify them, like company size or industry), you can always use Lusha to get the information you need so you can reach out to them.

5: Set up scoring and automation

Many leads are not at all ready for conversion when they first come in. That’s where marketing automation comes in. Email marketing is one of the most effective lead generation and lead nurturing techniques, and marketing automation helps ensure that you make the most out of every lead.

Another big bonus of using marketing automation is that it allows you to score your leads so that you can establish when they’re ready to buy from you (and when to pass them off to sales). As useful as this feature is, a surprising number of B2B marketers don’t use it to their advantage: a staggering 79%.

Plus, lead scoring can be automated and still be very accurate. For example, every time a lead views a product video on your site, they could get an extra 10 points to their score. Or, if they don’t have the right position in their company to make decisions, you could deduct 15 points.

6: Measure results

I talked about setting goals earlier – and I believe I also mentioned how important it is to measure your results.

Well, since you’ve set these goals already, measuring your results is easy. You know exactly what you wanted to achieve – the question is, have you? If so, how did you do it and how can you not only repeat this success but actually surpass it next time?

If you haven’t reached your goals, what kept you? What went wrong and where? It’s not a tragedy if you haven’t reached your goals; in fact, it might be a great opportunity to learn something valuable about your audience and your strategy.

As long as you use this information to continuously improve your lead generation process, you’re still winning.

Create a lead generation process and stick to it

Lead generation is vital to the sales process. Without new leads coming in regularly, your results will get stagnant pretty quickly.

And by creating a process, you’ll know exactly what needs doing, by who, and by when – which then helps you make sure you always have a steady stream of leads ready to be nurtured and converted.

Start by setting clear goals and targets you want to achieve, and then build your whole process around them. What content and actions will help you get there?

Then, sign up for Lusha, and you’ll get 5 free credits to get any leads’ phone numbers and email addresses – plus, there’s even a free browser extension to download. Or, if you prefer, you can get the contact API to add premium contact and company information to your CRM.

How to manage the lead generation process

Once you set up your lead generation, you’ve got to keep it going. Sometimes, this can involve a lot of manual work and get a bit tedious.

See which software solutions are a good fit for keeping the process flowing and automated so you can keep organized without losing your mind with manual tasks.

For instance, use your CRM to its fullest potential. It should be your single source of truth for information about your leads — you can track them from start to finish, see how long they stay in each stage, and manage handoffs from one department from another.

Other tools that could be helpful for managing the lead generation process include:

  • Project management software to keep teams aligned and on task
  • Call recording software to discover leads’ blockers and goals and to refine your sales messaging.
  • Visitor tracking software to see how users navigate your site

And of course, there are tools like Lusha, which not only can help with obtaining contact information for leads (as we mentioned above), but lead scoring and enrichment of lead information. If you want to use the Lusha platform to its greatest potential, talk to our team about adding Intent, which can help you prioritize and score your leads, or trying out our enrichment capabilities to add that extra info you need about leads to assign them to the right reps.

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