Lead generation, demand creation, growth hacking, growth, more sales. Whatever you want to call it, you are looking for more customers, more deals and more revenue.

 

Scaling your sales approach

To scale your sales organisation and results, you’ll need a repeatable and scaleable approach. A hypothesis you can test and improve as you grow.

During the past years there has been a lot of talk and discussion around new technologies and tools (Growbots, SalesLoft, Prospect.io, ZenProspect, Spiro.AI, Salesflare, SendBloom to name a few) as well as content marketing, marketing automation and social selling. And yes, this is great! Tools and technologies are here to stay and a proper tech stack will help sales organisations create more results and scale up. The amount of new technologies available is mind-blowing and choosing the ones you need is difficult. One needs a proper map of sales tech to understand all the new possibilities and opportunities there are.

On this post we’ll focus on the key components of a lead generation capabilities and related tools that are available. Lean -thinking will allow you to identify a standard workflow and allocate your resources to maximise value and eliminate waste in sales process. The role of tech and tools is to provide automation, lost costs and high quality. Tools will not make it for you, they are there only to support your process and management.

 

The key capabilities for Lead Generation

1. Analytics and Intelligence
2. Research and Prospecting
3. Inbound marketing channels
4. Messaging and Outreach
5. Sales Funnel Management and CRM

With capability we mean people, knowledge, resources and tools that let you accomplish one task at the time. While the tech and tools are important part of the equation one should first figure out the process and only then look at which tools to adopt. The tools are required to effectively and efficiently run any part of Sales System or Lead Generation process. Let’s look at each of the key capabilities a bit more closely.

Analytics and Sales Intelligence helps you to find potential customers and see how well your sales approach works and delivers. A lot of potential buyers are on digital and searching and proper analytics combined with the sales process help a great deal.

Research and Prospecting helps you enrich your data, find more contact people at selected companies, understand their current situation and priorities better and identify which people you should target with your messaging and meeting requests.

Inbound marketing channels are vital in B2B sales. Buyers are spending more and more time online researching solutions to their problems and comparing potential suppliers. Content marketing alone will not make it for you but you need to be out there to be found when a potential customer is looking. And more importantly, even as you get in touch with potential customers, you should be found in case other people in the decision making unit decide to seriously consider you.

Messaging and outreach is one of the most overlooked parts of the sales process. You need to get in touch with potential customers every day. Ability to scale up this effort is critical and ability to improve and iterate based on what kind of messages resonate best is important.

Sales Funnel Management and CRM is the oldest part of Sales System. Yet many companies struggle to get it right. Sales Funnel Management should be about qualification and critically looking at which customers and sales opportunities are worth pursuing.

Each of these topics is worth a blog post of it’s own. I hope this gives you an overview of what we are talking about in this post.

 

Simplified Lead Generation model for B2B Sales with example tool set

Here is a simplified Lead Generation capability map for B2B sales organisations. I am sure you have many of these cover somehow. I am equally sure that some of these are still missing or might require further automation to reach it’s full potential.

This looks quite straight forward. And that is how it should be!

Finding a standard workflow with predictable and sustainable results is a very good starting point. One can easily find exceptions and special cases in which this doesn’t apply – you’ll need to think about these and figure out if they are only exceptions or the norm that should be taken into account when putting a scalable Lead Generation process in place.

1. Prospecting. Identify potential customers, customer selection criteria you can pass forward to another person to work with. What kind of companies should we work with.
2. Enrichment. Name of the company is not enough, you’ll also need more information about them, their current situation and priorities, contact details to decision makers and so on. Finding information on digital is easy – one also has to clean the data to make it useful in the next steps in the process
3. Outreach. Scaleable and repeatable approach. Events, meetings, phone calls, all the social media platforms and email. Different people can be found via different platforms so it pays off to test what works well for you and with your customers. Email is still the most cost effective media for getting in touch with new people. It’s also scalable. Messaging on the other hand is difficult and requires iterations and continuous improvement. There are some industries where fully digital sales process works. Most industries do need phone calls and meetings tied into the sales process and workflow.
4. New opportunities. As soon as you get hold of a person and enter a meaningful business development conversation with them – boom – there is your first new opportunity.
5. Sales Funnel Management. All identified sales opportunities should be qualified (by the sales people) and selected ones require effort to drive forward.

So here is a skeleton, simplified Lead Generation approach. Maybe it works for you as is, maybe it requires a bit more details and fine-tuning to fit your industry and customers.

 

Lead Generation process with sales technology stack

Let’s look at the tool set. Here is the same approach with two tool sets that both fit the approach / process and work well together. We have identified a “budget” set for smaller teams and team that are still figuring our a business case for Lead Generation process. There is also a more advanced (read: expensive) tool set with more finesse, more power and more features.

Tools are not the thing. Tools, however, are necessary and important when scaling up sales organisation and sales results. As we have discussed earlier, scaling sales is very difficult. It is easy to hire more people and add costs, but improving results in relation to increased headcount is very very difficult. The tool set plays a key role here. But only after you have figured our the right process for you and your team.

 

Sales technology ecosystem needs a map

There are over 700 tools in the sales technology ecosystem. You do need a map to understand it let alone to pick the ones that fit your needs. Here is another long list of sales tools by YourSales.

As you review new tools try mapping them to the key capabilities you think you’ll need in your sales organisation. Having a map (even over a changing landscape) will help you select the tools you need.

 

Lean Sales on Lead Generation

Lean Sales focuses on growing sales results. We don’t focus on tool reviews. Tools and automation are a critical and integral part of scaling up sales results and sales organisations and therefore we wanted to tie tech stack and Lead Generation approach together. Automation and tools are the last step in designing and implementing Lean in Sales.

Lean Sales approach has four design principles:

1. Standardised work processes
2. Specialisation, roles and responsibilities
3. Centralised scheduling
4. Automation

 

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Sales management (takt time in Lean speak)

Assuming you have all of the key parts outlined above in place. What’s next?

Sales management would be the next item on your list of to do’s. The key questions for you would be:

1. Average sales cycle length (in days)
2. Average effort required to generate one lead
3. Average effort required to pursuit new sales opportunity

By answering these questions you are able to identify resource requirements for each step in the process. With resources we mean both human labour but also tools, technologies and other required means for getting the job done.

You should also measure output and yield for each step in the Lead Generation process.

The most interesting part of management is takt time. This means putting all the pieces to work together and in sync. Making the orchestra to play well together. Eliminating waste in the Lead Generation process. One could easily assume that now that I have all the pieces in place, let’s sit back and watch as the results start to roll it. And you might actually see a lot more results coming in! But to get most out of your new Lead Generation process you’ll actually need to work smarter (not necessarily harder) than that. The output of the sales process / Lead Generation process is very much related to the input. Key questions are:

1. How many new customer accounts are we able to find and research (per day or per week) ?
2. How many potential customers (individual people) are we able to get in touch with (per day or per week) ?
3. How many meetings are we able to convert into a real sales opportunity (per day or per week) ?

Answering these questions help you define which metrics to use and how often and closely should you track the progress of your new Lead Generation process. I’d propose visual management of the flow and daily stand-up meetings around the key metrics with the whole team of board. There will be a bottleneck in your process and this will help you identify it quickly.

Good luck with Lead Generation!