5 Things We Learned While Doing B2B Sales Lead Generation

Products are better received by prospects as compared to bespoke services.
For the longest of times, we couldn’t understand this pattern. Possibly, products convey credibility because they are visible. There are screenshots and videos to look at. Bespoke services, on the other hand, can’t be seen. Case studies can be read but then they are written for self-glorification. Either way, we found more responses when we initiated conversations for B2B lead generation on behalf of product companies.

A large number of new-age entrepreneurs still don’t understand a B2B sales funnel.
To stereotype, tech founders usually struggle with understanding the concept of sales funnel unless they have prior exposure. This makes this difficult for them to understand why only 1 out of (say) 10 prospects buy their product. More importantly, why it’s important for sales reps to engage with 10 to get 1 deal; making B2B lead generation critical to the funnel. And that whatever you do, it’s near impossible to close 8 out of those 10. However, they usually end up hoping against hope often. And then there’s the heartbreak. At Sales Design, we usually find ourselves in a situation where we have to educate founders on sales funnel for B2B lead generation. We’re more than glad to do that. It’s why we created ourselves.

LinkedIn is a double-edged sword for lead generation.
It’s not funny how many entrepreneurs out there have burnt their fingers with LinkedIn lead generation. When we dug deeper, here’s what we learned.

Most B2B companies have burnt their fingers with LinkedIn Ads. They are expensive and you’d be lucky to get to the right lead.

LinkedIn Content Creation is usually an area of interest for them. Since in their minds, LinkedIn = Facebook. The bad news is that LinkedIn content needs to be way more insightful and deep as compared to Facebook to catch the right audience. Also, it depends upon your daily creativity thus making it non-scaleable.

There’s a third way. Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator for B2B lead generation. It definitely gets better results than the previous two methods. But then again, there’s a specific way to use it.

Not everyone has the patience for outbound lead generation.
Outbound lead generation is tedious. It requires a lot of homework on how to segment and target the kind of enterprises one wants as clients. Sales cycles in outbound are longer. Content-based outbound requires daily creativity and is tedious to execute. Especially if an organization is addicted to inbound leads, going outbound can test their patience. Like scotch, it’s an acquired taste. And we’ve seen many companies give up on it quickly. At the same time, we’ve met companies who realize that they can’t keep up with their revenue goals without going outbound either inhouse or through outsourced lead generation. However, they are lesser in proportion.

Start-ups have a disadvantage while doing outbound. They should do it nonetheless..
An unproven product, a track record that barely exists, a young founder – all of these tend to scare buyers away. Mostly. And that’s what makes starting a company tough.

However, start-ups have an advantage too. There’s a huge segment of buyers out there who are willing to bet their money on a start-up because of their agility, responsiveness, flexibility and, sometimes, cost. These buyers are often entrepreneurs themselves and would rather work with start-ups than old-fashioned, bureaucratic organizations where resolutions of issues mean following a 7 days process and an escalation matrix. These buyers are just waiting to be approached.