Introduction
Technology is fast advancing. As it continues to do so, it creates a lot of new and exciting opportunities. If you own a tech company, or if you are a marketer in one, this is good news for you. The downside of this accelerated technology growth, however, is that it leads to saturation. It can be challenging to stand out in a saturated market and attract quality technology leads. With your target market exposed to so many options, your brand or product can easily go unnoticed.
Research shows that due to readily available information on digital channels, today’s customers no longer wait for sellers to tell them what to buy. They spend most of their purchase journey researching their problem and potential solutions, online and offline, before they reach out to you.
Figure 1: Customers spend most of their buying time on research (source: Gartner)
The trick then, is to have a lead generation strategy in place to ensure that a good majority of the technology leads in your target market feel compelled to reach out to you. Such a strategy should serve one purpose: to fill your sales funnel with high quality technology leads. That is, leads that have shown interest in your product and are therefore highly likely to turn into customers.
In this article, we will discuss the factors necessary for successful technology lead generation. We will look at the following areas:
- How to implement a technology sales lead generation system
- The role of sales and marketing in lead generation
- Tools for generating quality technology leads
- Strategies for getting technology leads into your sales funnel
Before we go into that, we need to mention up front that lead generation can take up a lot of your valuable time. It is also a sill that needs to be learned and honed. As time is of the essence in sales and marketing, and you most likely don’t have that much time, we encourage you to reach out to technology Lead generation services for a list of marketing qualified leads.
That said, read on below to learn what it takes to ace technology lead generation.
How to Implement a Technology Sales Lead Generation System
Before you start investing in any lead generation campaign, you have to ask yourself questions around these three areas:
Target audience: Beware of the tendency to market to everyone. To guarantee more sales and profits, make your target market as focused as possible. As yourself: Who are your buyers? What companies and industries do they work in?
Pain point: What is the purpose of your product? What problem does it solve for its intended audience?
Competition: It’s not uncommon for your targets to tell you, “Oh, your product is like the one from company X”. Such comments can catch you off guard and ruin your chances of closing a sale. To prevent this from happening, study your product, study your competitors’ products, then figure out what makes your product unique.
Ask yourself these questions: What is your product’s unique proposition? Can you articulate that value to your technology leads? Does the technology lead generation services agency you have contracted understand that value and can they articulate it to prospects?
Once you have answers for all these questions, you can start creating a lead generation strategy that will help you nurture leads from the top to the bottom of the funnel. Your strategy should include:
- Digital marketing activity. This includes social media, blogs, landing pages, email marketing, paid advertising,
- Offline marketing activities such as PR, telemarketing, trade shows, etcetera
- CRM
- Your website
Why CRM Software Should Be Part of Your Lead Generation Plan
CRM software is pivotal to the success of any lead generation campaign. CRM serves as a tool for “storing” and nurturing all your leads, despite their quality level. With CRM, you can
- Set clear objectives for your customer journey
- Have access to real time data, hence market more accurately
- Improve your marketing with A/B testing
- Understand performance in each of your digital and offline marketing channels
- Improve campaign visibility and transparency
- Track interactions with every lead
Why Should You Invest In a Website?
Your website is the center of all your online and offline campaigns. Every email, social media post, landing page opt-in, etcetera, should bring your prospective customers back to your website. As such, your website should have content for
- Top of the funnel, to increase awareness
- Middle of the funnel, to increase understanding of their problem and how you can solve it
- Bottom of the funnel, to build more attraction and increase conversion
Your content should be in blogs, but you should offer some as gated content in order to build up your mailing list.
Offline advertising tactics should also drive traffic back to your website.
Make a Plan For Your Lead Generation Campaign
You should have two plans:
- A content plan
- A campaign plan
Content plan
A content plan is part of your wider campaign plan. It should account for activities over a span of 90 days and address key areas such as:
- Content creation: The content you will need to drive awareness and increase attraction
- How you will use that content. That is, which channels will you use? Which content will you post on your blog and which will you use as gated content? (this part should feature in your campaign action plan)
- When you will use the content.
Content should include video, informative articles, case studies, reviews and testimonials, eBooks, white papers and user generated content.
Campaign plan
This is a detailed account of all the actions you will take on your marketing channels, to convert leads.
We have already mentioned offline and online marketing tactics. Your campaign plan tells you:
- How and when you will use those tactics to ensure that traffic is converting on your landing pages
- How you will follow up with leads who give you their email addresses
- Team alignment: The actions that sales and marketing teams need to take together or independently to increase conversion
The Role of The Sales Team In Lead Generation
Yes, lead generation is the primary function of marketing. And yes, without marketing, sales-people would probably have to do a lot of prospecting and admin work that comes with qualifying leads. But, sales people also play a crucial part in the lead generation process. They are the ones who chase down qualified opportunities and close them.
Technology companies run the risk of creating bottle necks in their lead generation campaigns if sales and marketing teams don’t cooperate with each other.
Research shows that in most teams, sales believe marketing doesn’t deliver high quality leads. Marketing also, question the efficiency of sales teams in converting leads into customers.
Before you start your campaign,
- Ensure your teams understand their individual and collective roles
- Define what lead quality means and have every team member commit to delivering above that benchmark.
- Agree on lead volume and then empower your marketing team to deliver. This can include tactics such as using technology lead generation services.
- Teams should also agree on time frames within which to respond to leads. If setting drip emails, agree on the timeline between each email.
Best practices for generating technology leads
You have now figured out your lead generation system. You have a plan, content and you have decided on lead generation channels to use.
You can enrich your system with these five tips.
1. Make Your Landing Pages Interactive
You no doubt want your campaign to motivate people into taking action. As your landing page is the first place that traffic will land, take note of the following:
- Create dedicated landing pages. Landing pages dedicated to a specific campaign keep leads focused on the specific action you want them to take
- The design of your landing page should be simple, elegant and interactive.
- The call to action should be clear and should also stand out.
- Use a form that collects a lead’s name and email address. Optional details can include company name and phone number.
- Avoid asking for too much information upfront as you risk making the opt-in process feel like a chore
If you aren’t sure of your landing page design, we recommend asking your technology lead generation services provider for help you A/B test different designs.
2. Offer a Free Trial Period
Free trials give customers the reassurance that what they are buying will work. For a technology company, a free trial gives you the opportunity to wow your leads with all the great ways you can improve their life or turn their company into a profit-making machine.
You can offer a free trial on a dedicated landing page, on the home page of your website or on pop ups alongside relevant content.
The length of your trial period will depend on how complex your offering is. If offering a trial for a longer time, consider limiting some features, so that customers have to “open” those features on a paid subscription. This will increase your conversions if indeed your product is of value to them.
3. Host Webinars
ON24 surveyed over 22,000 webinars and came up with these findings:
- 95% of the marketers surveyed said that webinars are key to their lead generation efforts. (source: BloggingX)
- 76% said they achieved more leads with webinars (source: BloggingX)
You can use webinars to:
- Teach your audience about your technology products
- Promote your brand as a thought leader
- Generate interest and stay top of mind among your audience
- Build a list of highly qualified technology leads
Make a recording of your webinar so that it continues to generate leads perpetually.
4. Ask Your Customers for Referrals
Satisfied customers can become loyal brand ambassadors. This is why providing a great customer experience should be top of your agenda in every interaction with your customers. Your current customers most likely know other companies that would be interested in using your solution. If they are happy with you, they will more than likely recommend your solution.
So how do you ensure your referral programme works?
- You can do so by creating a customer loyalty programme and incentivizing members of that club for referrals.
- You can also include a call to action to “refer a friend and claim your prize”, so that all those who read your content can refer others.
5. Ask People What They Want
Anyone who is looking at your product probably has a wish list of problems they would like a solution for. Use surveys to ask them what they want. A survey will give you a direct answer. When you get this personal, you open up opportunities for powerful, personalized marketing and selling.
You can even go as far as asking your leads the amount of money they’d be willing to spend on solving a specific problem that they are experiencing.
Conclusion
Any credible agency that offers technology lead generation services will tell you that no matter how innovative your product is, it still won’t sell itself. Your target audience needs to know about it, meaning, you need to invest some effort, time and money in marketing that product.
The information provided in this article should serve as a great starting point to widen your customer base and to create more revenue through high quality leads.
