Last updated on 10 May 2024

Improve Leads for Your B2B Business: 6 Proven Methods

To generate effective leads in B2B marketing, quality matters more than quantity. Focus on leads that are the right fit for your products or services and are genuinely interested. Use a lead scoring system based on engagement, downloads, and customer status. Nurture leads with relevant content. Employ advanced tactics such as setting strict criteria for qualified leads, creating buyer personas, offering lead magnets, and many more. Prioritize qualified leads to optimize sales and revenue.

Two individuals checking for leads quality

Introduction

When it comes to generating leads, quality trumps quantity every time. It doesn’t matter how many leads you have if they’re not the right fit for your products or services.

That’s why, as a business-to-business (B2B) marketer, it’s essential to focus on generating high-quality leads. But what exactly makes a lead high quality (sales qualified lead)? And how can you generate more of them? Keep reading to find out.

We’ll discuss the same in this article and introduce you to advanced B2B marketing tactics that can help you improve your lead quality.

Let’s get started!

How to Qualify Leads as a B2B Marketer?

As a B2B marketer, you need to consider two factors when qualifying a lead. The first is whether the lead is a good match for your products or services. The second is whether the lead is interested in what you have to offer.

You can use a lead scoring system to rate leads on these factors and others, such as budget and timeline. This will help you prioritize which leads to follow up with first.

Most companies score leads by assigning them rankings like “hot,” “warm,” and “cold.” You can also name them as “A,” “B,” or “C” based on how likely they are to convert.

There are a number of factors you can use to score your leads, such as:

The amount of time they spend on your website
The pages they visit
The content they download
Whether they’re already a customer or not
Whether they show interest in using your tool for free or not

By understanding which leads are more valuable, you can make sure you’re spending your time and resources on the right ones.

It’s also important to remember that not all leads will be ready to buy right away. Some may just be starting their research or may not have a budget yet. That’s why it’s important to nurture your leads with helpful content until they’re ready to buy.

Now that you know how to qualify leads, let’s take a look at some advanced B&B marketing tactics you can use to generate high-quality leads.

Advanced B2B Marketing Tactics to Improve Lead Quality

Sales teams are always looking for ways to improve lead quality. After all, leads are the lifeblood of any business, and the better the leads, the better the chance of making a sale.

Here are six advanced B2B marketing tactics you can use to generate higher-quality leads:

1. Be Strict With Your Criteria for a Qualified Lead

This may seem like common sense, but you’d be surprised how many businesses don’t have a set definition of what constitutes a qualified lead. When you don’t have strict criteria, your team will end up wasting time pursuing leads that aren’t a good fit.

To avoid this, sit down with your sales and marketing teams and come up with a definition of a qualified lead.

Here are some questions that can help you define what a qualified lead will look like:

What is the lead’s budget?
Are they the decision-maker?
What is their timeline?
What needs does this lead have that your product can solve?

For example, instead of considering every SaaS business a qualified lead, narrow down on your criteria by adding more points to what your qualified lead will be. You may say, your qualified lead is:

A B2B SaaS business
10-15 members’ team
Based in the United States
Having an annual turnover of over 1 million dollars

Doesn’t that make more sense?

Once you have a definition, make sure everyone on your team is using the same criteria. This will help ensure that your team is only pursuing leads that are worth their time.

2. Create Buyer Personas With Advanced Segmentation

One of the first things you need to do to generate high-quality leads is to create buyer personas.

Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customer. They help you understand your target audience better and identify what kinds of leads are most likely to convert.

To create buyer personas, start by surveying your current customers. Find out what needs they had that your product or service helped them with. This will give you a good idea of the kinds of leads you should be targeting.

You can also use demographic information, such as job title, company size, and location, to create buyer personas.

Once you’ve created your B2B buyer personas, you can use them to create targeted content that will attract the right kinds of leads.

3. Develop a Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is an irresistible offer that encourages prospects to trade their contact information for something valuable. It’s a great way to generate leads that are more likely to convert.

When developing a lead magnet, it’s important to keep two things in mind. First, make sure it’s something your target audience would actually find valuable. Second, make sure it’s relevant to what you’re selling.

For example, let’s say you sell software that helps businesses manage their social media accounts

Your lead magnet could be a free ebook that teaches businesses how to get the most out of social media. Or, it could be a free trial of your software.

Offering a free ebook or trial is a great way to generate leads that are more likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

You can also build a free tool to attract your target user base, just like HubSpot runs a free CRM.

This approach allows your prospects or leads to try before they buy and helps you attract high-quality leads directly to your sales funnel.

You can also give an irresistible offer to make them upgrade to the paid model of your tool to get more insights into what they find useful for their business growth.

Other types of lead magnets that work well with generating qualified leads for a B2B business include:

In-depth guides on industry-specific topics
Comprehensive how-to guides
Detailed case studies, showcasing how your product or service helped other businesses (in your targeted audience group)
Resource libraries
Easy-to-use workbooks or checklists
Templates

4. Use Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Another way to improve lead quality is to focus on account-based marketing (ABM). ABM is a targeted approach to marketing that focuses on key accounts that are most likely to convert.

ABM has a number of benefits, including:

Improved lead quality
Increased sales productivity and increase revenue
Better alignment between marketing and sales

If you’re looking for ways to improve lead quality, ABM is definitely worth considering.

You should start by identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP). Once you’ve done that, you can create targeted account lists and develop personalized campaigns for each one.

ABM can be used at every stage of the marketing funnel, from awareness to conversion. However, it’s most effective when used in conjunction with other lead generation tactics such as content marketing, webinars, and email marketing.

For example, if you’re targeting a specific company, you can include information in your marketing materials that would be relevant to that company specifically. Additionally, you can target the decision-makers within that company specifically, rather than trying to reach a general audience.

ABM is a great way to improve the quality of your leads, and it can also help you close deals faster.

5. Research and Connect With Your Leads on Social Media

Sales professionals are always looking for new leads, and social media provides an excellent opportunity to find them. However, it can be difficult to know how to use social media effectively for this purpose. Here are a few tips:

First, don’t just focus on quantity. It’s important to have a large number of leads, but if they’re not high-quality leads, they’re not going to do you much good.

Second, use social media to research your leads. LinkedIn is a great platform for this, as you can often find out quite a bit about a person’s work history and interests. It also makes it easy to connect with the decision-makers of your targeted company, varying from Directors to CTOs, VPs, senior managers, and other executives.

Finally, don’t be afraid to reach out and connect with potential leads on social media. A simple message can go a long way, and you never know where it might lead. You can also take the help of a trusted PPC management agency.

By following these tips, you can use social media to improve the quality of your B2B leads. So get out there and start networking!

6. Leverage Marketing Automation Software

Marketing automation software can help you better identify and qualify leads.

By using lead scoring, you can prioritize the most promising leads and then nurture those leads with targeted content that speaks to their specific needs. Providing relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey will help you keep them engaged and move them closer to becoming a customer.

Marketing automation software can help you automate this process, making it easier to stay in touch with your leads and provide them with the information they need.

Additionally, it can help you to automate repetitive tasks like email marketing, social media outreach, and lead nurturing.

This frees up your sales team’s time on pursuing leads so that they can focus on selling and closing more deals, rather than on administrative tasks.

When used properly, marketing automation software solutions such as HubSpot, Leadfeeder, Sendinblue, and Pardot can be a powerful tool for improving lead quality.

Marketing automation software is not a silver bullet, however. It requires careful planning and execution to get the most out of it. If you are not careful, you can end up with a lot of low-quality leads that will never convert.

To avoid this, make sure that you:

Set up lead scoring so that you can prioritize the most promising leads.
Use targeted content to nurture leads at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Automate repetitive tasks so that your sales team can focus on selling.
Create automated drip email sequences that provide value and build relationships with your leads so that they are more likely to convert when they are ready.

By following these tips, you can make sure that marketing automation software works for you and not against you, and it helps improve the quality of your B2B leads.

Also, check out some B2B marketing automation workflows for inspiration!

Ready to Improve Lead Quality for Greater Sales and Revenue?

The problem with most B2B leads is that they are not properly qualified, which results in a lot of wasted time and effort trying to sell to people who will never buy.

The best way to improve your B2B lead quality is to put in place a lead qualification process. This process should be designed to weed out the tire-kickers and time-wasters, and only allow qualified leads through to the sales team.

You can use the B2B marketing tactics that I’ve discussed in this post to generate more of qualified leads that are quick to convert into actual sales and revenue.

If you have questions about lead qualification, lead scoring, or targeted prospecting, feel free to get in touch via the comments below. I’ll be happy to help!