B2B lead generation is the process of identifying, attracting, and presenting prospective buyers of product or service. It involves accumulating prospective customer’s information that will be useful to later help to make a sale. Leads are then nurtured and passed to sales once they are qualified. The goal is to create a consistent pipeline of highly-targeted prospects who can be turned into clients. 

To generate B2B leads one of the important aspects is to run an efficient lead generation campaign. There are 5 stages you need to follow to create an efficient campaign:

1. Setting campaign objective: Set up the campaign objective depending on the goal you want to achieve. 
2. Evaluating and selecting your campaign target: Evaluate and identify the prospect you want to target, prospect’s pain points, and issues that might be addressed by your organization.
3. Determining your media outlet: You can choose from different media outlets ranging from email marketing to eBooks and guides. Email campaigns are a great example of an efficient strategy for generating B2B leads online.
4. Developing an offer: Develop and offer to identify prospects who are interested in your products or services. For instance, it can be a free download to a guide or an eBook. Once a lead shows interest you can work on nurturing the lead.
5. Creating a communications strategy process: This includes strategizing what your follow-up process is and drafting messages for the follow-up sequence. 

6 easy strategies for the efficient lead generation process

1. Optimize landing page
A good landing page will help you to generate effective leads. Landing pages must appeal to your target audience, encouraging them to act, and become a lead. Your landing page should be simple without any visual clutter. Most importantly, your call-to-action button should be clear. A call-to-action button shouldn’t confuse the reader. Make your offer clear and to the point.

2. Face to face meetings
Face to face meetings is one of the oldest strategies, but it works well. Because of the psychological aspect where you know that you are talking to another person who is sitting in front of you. This originates a feeling of being heard by the leads and allows them to ask questions and get to know the person they are speaking to. With the growing age of technology and so many scams happening, there is not a 100% chance you are talking to the right person. Some telemarketing companies choose recorded calls and robots to make lead generation simpler. However, not every telemarketing company uses this method. Face to face doesn’t have to include traveling door to door always, you could also attend things such as events, trade fairs, or expos. 

3. Email marketing 
Research from Experian states that $1 invested in email marketing initiatives still yields roughly $44.25 return for marketers. Buying an email marketing list, loading it into your CRM, and sending unsolicited emails is a big NO! These outdated tactics will most likely get your ISP blocked and prohibit you from sending emails at all. You need to remember some tactics for creating efficient emails like the engaging subject line, brief, relevant images, integrated social links, and clear call to action. It is again a cost-efficient way to nurture and generate leads. This strategy can be used for remarketing and follow up as well

4. Telemarketing 
Telemarketing generates interest, creates opportunities, provides information, gets customer feedback, makes appointments, and produces leads by telephone. Telemarketing has an edge over other strategies. $1 invested in telemarketing companies could make $11 back on their investment although a lot of telemarketing companies are claiming that the ROI is more like $15-18 per $1 invested. Telemarketing blends perfectly with other marketing strategies as well. For instance, appointment setting which combines telemarketing with a follow up of face to face marketing.

5. Networking with people 
Networking through any mode be it exhibitions, trade fairs, social media yields a noticeable list of active prospects that you can begin to nurture and follow-up within the days and weeks afterward. Meeting people face-to-face is a powerful opportunity to make a lasting impression and accelerate the prospect relationship.

6. Remarketing
Remarketing enables you to get back to people who left the funnel midway and paves them a way back in. Remarketing is one of the most essential tools for accelerating the ROI of your paid advertising spend. The reason why remarketing often proves to be so productive is that 80 percent of the buying process is over and done with before the first direct interaction. Compared to other marketing-based strategies, remarketing converts up to 50 percent of web traffic compared with the two percent converted with search campaigns.

Impact of the restriction imposed due to COVID-19?

With the increase in COVID-19 cases, the majority of companies have asked their employees to work from home. 46% of American businesses have implemented remote-work policies as of mid-February. It was not easy for all employers to provide employees with access to all the tools needed to work from home. Generating leads without F2F meetings is a challenge when meetings are held via Zoom rather than face-to-face and so on. 

The difficult part is to build trust among the sellers and buyers without meeting face to face. Sales professionals should focus on providing an exceptional customer experience. Working efficiently towards this will build the trust factor rapidly even though you will be connecting virtually.

How FunnL’S framework normalizes the restrictions imposed to WFH on lead generation

B2B lead generation agencies like FunnL have an experienced, accessible remote work setup and incorporate the latest digital technologies to keep up your business. Due to their framework employees were already prepared for working from home. They had all the experience, and skills that are needed to work remotely. Thus, the idea of work from home did not impact the lead generation process. With an experience of generating 10,000+ sales qualified meetings, FunnL provides you with an all-in-one Inside Sales Platform that permits you to design, manage, measure, and optimize your inside sales campaigns.

This transition from working in office towards working from home has impacted the lead generation process in a positive way. Companies will get to see more productivity and efficiency. Further, the work from home is the most cost-efficient method of lead generation. Work from home provides many advantages, some of them are like:

1. Better life balance
2. You can recruit the best, irrespective of their location
3. Positive environment
4. Less commute stress
5. Improved inclusivity

There are various other reasons as well. Work from home has had a positive impact and it is here to stay.