Lead generation has become a complex balance between finding the right channels and timing your campaigns. Instead of being able to spread your spend across multiple advertising and syndication avenues, B2B marketing teams are now required find the best performing lead generation on a fluctuating month-to-month basis. That’s really hard. Couple that challenge with the growing need for more sales leads that fit a changing personas, and you have a recipe for rampant lead conversion issues. 

There are only about 4% of your buyers in the market at any given time, which means if you want more sales leads at a faster rate, you’re going to need to work with the people front lining your organization’s outbound efforts.

The Unending Need for More Sales Leads

Before we dive into the HOW, it’s important to call out that the pressure to deliver a steady stream of sales leads is constant. Regardless of where you’re at in your marketing attributed pipeline, there will be an expectation of more leads. Companies are always in pursuit of new business opportunities to fuel growth, and the sales team is tasked with converting these opportunities into revenue. However, the quality and quantity of these leads can significantly impact the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales process.

For marketers, generating leads is not just about volume; it’s about providing leads that are primed for engagement. In other words, the leads handed over to sales should already exhibit a level of interest and intent that justifies further investment of time and resources by the sales team. Which begs the question: what is a sales lead really?

What Qualifies as a Sales Lead?

The reality is that sales qualified leads will vary based on your organization and the type of products you market. However, we can assume that a sales lead is defined as someone who is interested in talking to a salesperson. It doesn’t stop there though, because buyers operate in what has been deemed as the “dark funnel” – engagements that are hard to trace due to being outside of your influence or any other tracking efforts you might have in place. The issue is that, as marketers, we need to gather that information somehow; so, we turn to intent data.

Therefore, it can be surmised that a sales lead is a qualified buyer who has a high intent score and is interested in talking to your sales team, right? Not quite, as there are two levels of intent to look at. Intent to learn, and intent to buy. Most intent data providers will track and package intent data that is showing a desire to learn more, however, for it to be a real sales lead, we need to find the purchase intent. How can we do that? Through the use of lead development and sales development.

Lead Development

Lead development is the process in which marketing teams engage the leads they generate in a targeted, personalized form as opposed to the standard marketing nurture content. This strategy is essential for B2B marketers to identify in-market buyers—prospects who are actively seeking solutions similar to what the company offers.

By engaging leads through personalized content, targeted email campaigns, and quality outreach, marketers can track behaviors and signals that indicate buying intent. For example, a lead frequently downloading product-focused content or attending solution-specific webinars might be signaling they are in the market for your product. These insights enable marketers to prioritize and pass on these leads to sales as highly qualified opportunities, thereby increasing the likelihood of convert.

Sales Development

While it’s true that marketing is responsible for lead generation and development, they can also play a part in the process once a lead has been qualified as an SQL. Sales development involves further vetting the lead, understanding their specific needs, and positioning your product or service as the best solution.

As a marketer, sales enablement is key to ensuring that sales teams have the resources and information they need to effectively engage with SQLs. This includes providing sales teams with access to the content and insights gathered during the lead development process, as well as training on how to use this information in their outreach.

Lead Scoring can also play a critical role in sales development. By assigning a score to each lead based on their behavior and engagement, sales teams can prioritize their efforts and focus on the leads that are most likely to convert.

Try to encourage regular communication between marketing and sales teams. This can be facilitated through joint meetings, shared dashboards, and collaboration on lead scoring models. The goal is to ensure that sales teams are fully equipped to take over leads from marketing and drive them toward a sale.

Does Marketing Lead Nurture Still Work?

The regular business decision maker has not only become more educated as the market continues to expand, but they are also working with far less resources year over year. This current state has called effectiveness of traditional lead nurture strategies into question. However, the principles of lead nurture remain as relevant as ever, provided they are adapted to the modern buyer’s journey.

Lead Generation as a Paid Service

Marketing teams can leverage paid lead generation services to connect with well-educated buyers by outsourcing the identification and initial qualification of high-quality leads. These services often use data analytics and prioritized outreach to find prospects who have already demonstrated a strong interest in specific industry solutions. By filtering leads based on detailed criteria such as firmographics, job roles, and intent data, these services ensure that the leads provided are further down the funnel and primed for custom follow up.

Since these leads have a layer of intent data added, marketers can skip basic educational content and instead offer deeper insights, case studies, and solution comparisons that help them make final purchasing decisions. This targeted approach not only improves the efficiency of the sales process but also enhances the buyer’s experience by providing the relevant information they need to move forward confidently.

Changing the Marketing Funnel

The traditional marketing funnel, where leads move from awareness to consideration to decision in a linear fashion, is no longer a perfect fit for the modern buyer’s journey. Today’s buyers often move back and forth between stages, conducting their own research and engaging with multiple touchpoints before making a decision.

As a result, marketers need to adopt a more flexible approach to lead nurture. This might involve creating more personalized and dynamic content experiences, using data and analytics to anticipate the needs of each lead, and being prepared to engage with leads across multiple channels and stages of the funnel.

Consider adopting a more agile approach to your marketing funnel, where content and messaging are tailored to the individual lead’s behavior and stage in the journey. Use tools like predictive analytics to anticipate when a lead is ready to move to the next stage and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Conclusion

If your team wants to convert more leads, there needs to be a more flexible approach to campaigns. Instead of investing all of your time and resources into identifying one or two converting channels, you’ll need to focus more on the consistent engagement identification throughout the lifecycle of the lead so you can pinpoint the moment they become a primed for sales outreach. Decision making in the B2B tech space can flip from the top of funnel to the bottom of funnel in the blink of an eye, so using predictive data models and bottom of funnel lead gen can help you make this challenge a little easier to address.

If you’d like to learn more, take a look at our Intent Data Whitepaper which addresses the current state of intent models and how marketing teams are pivoting to build a more scalable lead development process.