5 Steps to Generate B2B Leads Fast

Founders and small business owners need systems and processes to grow their businesses without spending too much time and money. In other words, they need sales leads and they need them fast.

With all the sales and marketing tools out there and a plethora of unproven service providers promising you tons of sales leads for a monthly fee, how do you go about generating B2B sales leads without breaking the bank?

Easy, by following the proven 5 steps outlined in this article. Here we’ll cover the basics of lead generation and provide an action plan for you to get started.

1. Create an awesome problem-solving, benefit-loaded landing page

A well-designed landing page has only one purpose: to turn the visitor into a lead by getting his or her contact information.

How do you accomplish that? Delivering value.

Your product or service surely has many benefits that will improve the life of your buyer persona in many ways. Your landing page must communicate those benefits clearly and in an appealing way.

The headline goes straight to the pain point of the visitor and promises to solve his problem. Then it features three benefits the person will obtain when signing up.

Your landing page should only have one action step: to sign up for a demo, download a report, or schedule a call — and it must be very obvious, without distractions or other buttons that may pull visitors away to other pages.

In the example above, Deel has a big button on the page with a clear call to action: Request a Demo.

Both copy and design are essential, so work with your team to create an awesome landing page, or use one of the many apps out there to create it.

2. Drive traffic to your landing page or website

Your beautifully designed landing page is of no use if you get no visitors. So the next step is to drive traffic to your site.

You can use social media selling, content marketing, and paid methods to drive traffic.

Social selling

Social selling is about connecting with people on social networks and posting helpful content that will attract visitors to your site. If you’re in B2B sales, focus on LinkedIn; if you’re in B2C, focus on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, depending on your client’s demographics.

Content marketing

Content marketing is a long-term strategy to drive organic traffic to your website, providing free content related to your product or service.

Content marketing will establish you as an expert in your field or industry, through the publication of blog posts, videos, reports, white papers, infographics and more.

You can distribute this content through different channels and always link back to your landing page. The reasoning is that if people like your content, they will click on your link and sign up for more.

Paid advertising

Paid methods to drive traffic can take different forms.

You can do paid search advertising, bidding on keywords on search engines like Google or Bing, and place your ad in front of people already searching for those terms (this is known as pay-per-click or PPC).

Or you can do social media advertising, placing boosted posts or customized ads in front of your target audience. Every major social network has its own advertising platform.

Use a combination of all these methods to drive traffic to your landing page and obtain better leads.

3. Qualify your B2B sales leads quickly with live chat

It used to be that to qualify a lead you had to email back and forth during a matter of days or months. Now, you can do this in no time with the power of live chat.

In fact, the call to action button on your landing page can be “Chat with us now” or something along those lines.

Once you are chatting with them, you can use a series of questions to know if they match your offering and where they are in their buyer’s journey.

Some things you may want to find out are: Are they the decision maker? Do they have the intention to buy or are they just researching? Do they acknowledge that you can resolve their pain point?

There are a few best practices for using sales chat that you can learn, but the most important one is to give a quick and personalized response. This is known as direct engagement with your leads — and more engaged leads means a better experience for them, which results in more sales and more referrals.

Be mindful though, that having a team available to chat live with your website visitors around the clock, may stretch out your resources, especially if you’re a growing company just starting out.

You have two options: use chatbots to prequalify your leads through an initial contact or outsource sales chat to a managed service team — or do both!

4. Optimize your website for lead conversion

There’s no point in having lots of traffic to your website if you don’t have an effective strategy to convert them into customers.

Here’s where optimization comes in, especially in two areas: search engine optimization (SEO) and website optimization.

SEO is about making your website friendly to Google and other search engines so they will rank you higher in their search results (which, of course, results in organic traffic).

Although SEO can seem technical and complicated at times because we are working with algorithms, it’s basically selecting keywords related to how leads would search your product and then writing quality content with those keywords in such a way that search engines would understand it.

Optimizing your website for conversions, on the other hand, is about focusing on a specific goal you want for your visitors, and guiding them towards that goal. Whether you want them to buy or subscribe or schedule a demo, be specific on that goal and lead them there.

Some websites are like mazes, where you can take different paths and get lost in a myriad of information; others are like a one-way street, where you’ll inevitably get to a unique destination. A website optimized for conversions is like the latter.

5. Use a B2B sales leads database

The four steps above are ways of attracting and converting leads through inbound sales. But inbound tactics work best when complemented with outbound sales, where you proactively search for leads and contact them to generate interest in your product and services.

Using a B2B sales lead database, also known as a sales intelligence tool, you can find the contact information of prospects who match your ideal client. Apollo’s database of over 210M contacts in 35M companies makes it the perfect hub for finding accurate B2B sales leads.

The users who find the most success with the Prospect Searcher take advantage of the 200+ data attributes and granular filters Apollo offers. When searching for prospects, target your ideal prospect with laser precision using filters such as:

• Title
• Company
• Number of Employees
• Size by Department
• Recent Hires
• Revenue
• Location
• Other Keywords

One very useful feature of Apollo is the ability to create “personas” within the app to later add them to your sequences. Check out this 90-second tutorial on how to create a persona in Apollo.io.

Beyond providing accurate information about your prospects, Apollo.io lets you create email sequences, automate and personalize messages, call prospects within the app, and much more.

Ready to generate better sales leads?

It’s hard work to set up and optimize your website, then drive traffic and convert them to customers — but it’s worth it.

Apollo.io can make your lead generation process easier, so try today for free.