3 Lead Generation Best Practices for Filling your Sales Pipeline

The better you can find and attract the right prospects, the easier it will be to close deals at the bottom of your sales funnel.

But, for 42.1% of B2B professionals, finding the right strategies to get the attention of their leads and bring them into their pipeline is the ultimate challenge.

That’s why we asked Founding Member of Shiny and B2B sales consultant, Atakan Ozuysal, to share his best practices for generating his ideal buyers. Read on to learn how Atakan uses Apollo to 5x his sales pipeline.

Some background on Atakan and Shiny

Shiny is a digital marketplace for fractional executives to get hired by awesome startups and SMBs. As the director of operations, Atakan’s job is to find and engage best-fit startup companies and work with them to fine-tune their outbound strategies.

Like many B2B professionals, finding the right buyers is a big part of his day-to-day.

Before Apollo, Atakan was using 3-4 different tools to find and engage with his leads; and still faced challenges like finding accurate contact information on LinkedIn.

“Before I was using separate tools for email and prospecting and LinkedIn and it was taking too much time,” he says, “But with Apollo, I only use Apollo…I don’t go anywhere else to generate leads.”

What used to take Atakan multiple hours, now only takes him 5 minutes and a few clicks.

Here are his top 3 best practices for generating the right leads in less time with better results:

Reach your ICP with these 3 lead generation best practices

#1: Invest in a granular database to find prospects that align with your ICP

If you want to efficiently find the leads most likely to become buyers, you need a database that allows you to:

• Search and filter for granular data and contact information
• Build lead lists
• Import/export the data into a CSV
• Sync information to and from your CRM
• And enrich your existing customer data

With over 250M contacts across 60M+ companies, Apollo data is not only robust but full of prospecting features that make finding the right buyers easy. For example, users can create personas that granularly define the attributes of their key target accounts and apply the Persona filters to find the leads that perfectly align with their ideal customer profile (ICP).

“I love Apollo data,” says Atakan, “Personal numbers, work numbers, emails…it’s all-in-one and so easy to manage.”

For lead generation that happens outside of our database, Atakan uses the Chrome Extension, which allows him to take Apollo data in other tools, such as LinkedIn. “On LinkedIn profiles, I can now see buyers’ data all in one place and I can instantly save and add them to my sales sequences,” he says.

Here’s what the Chrome Extension looks like in action:

Download the Apollo Chrome Extension and start bringing more buyers into your funnel in a fraction of the time.

#2: Leverage smart automation to gain insights and streamline outreach

Sales automation tools drive lead generation. They increase efficiency and productivity, reduce cost, and allow sellers to scale outreach and peak the interest of best-fit buyers.

Automation tools like Job Change alerts provide instant insights on when a contact has changed roles and is in a perfect position to become a hot lead. In Apollo, sellers can also subscribe to filtered searches to get automatic email alerts when there are new people or companies that match their search criteria.

In terms of outreach, Atakan has seen enormous success using automation in Sequences. “I can talk to 100 leads in just one day,” he says, “It is making my life easier and saving me a lot of time.”

Show your product’s value and initiate interest with a uniquely crafted series of automated emails, phone calls, LinkedIn connection requests, social messages, and more.

To learn more about Sequences, check out this blog post on Apollo’s top 3 sales sequences.

#3: Create personalized content to engage your leads

Like many sellers, Atakan is passionate about communicating with people and creating valuable conversations. In his selling journey, it’s important to him that he’s able to effectively reach out to potential buyers and create personalized conversations with each of them.

And it’s important that you do, too!

71% of consumers don’t just prefer, but expect personalized interactions. Which means that lead generation and personalization must go hand-in-hand.

Engage your leads and nurture relationships by:

• Sending emails that include personalized snippets like first and last name, location, job title, company info, etc.
• Sharing value-based content (blogs, E-books, webinars, case studies) that address their pain points and offer solutions.
• Delivering personalized and engaging messages via video prospecting.
• Predicting interest and providing value early using buyer intent data.

Reliable data, sales automation tools, and personalized interactions create eager buyers. Forward-thinking sales leaders like Atakan know that the best way to do this is to invest in a reliable B2B sales engagement tool.

Stand out to your leads and successfully bring them through the funnel by signing up for Apollo.io today.