Rapid acquisition of outbound leads – who can count on it? 

Conducting outbound activities in the form of cold-maling, LinkedIn activities or even cold calling has the advantage that we can acquire a significant number of leads very quickly. Each of the activities mentioned is also relatively inexpensive: operating in-house, by buying the tools and delegating an employee to handle them, is the cost, 1 FTE (usually the national minimum) and the tools. Hiring an external company is even cheaper and quicker, because you already have the tools in your subscription.

And yet not every company is able to win contracts from leads obtained through this route. Many companies are unable to generate leads at all for long periods of time, yet I know quite a few people who continue with outbound activities despite this. Why? If you are running a software house, all you need is one “golden shot” once a year to generate between $25,000 and $50,000 in contract revenue, with upselling revenue increasing 4 or even 10 times in the long run.

The fast track, however, is available to those organisations that can demonstrate one or more of the following:

1. localisation – the campaign is in the language of the recipient and you have a branch in the market you are hitting, and you have a local representative, e.g. a German sales person in the campaign for Germany.
2. niche – your specialisation is so rare or your USP so promising that it cannot be passed by, e.g. you are one of the few doing web applications for video game developers or your low-code platform reduces development time by 20%.

We trust local companies, even if we don’t know anyone in them personally. We trust companies that specialise in their fields even more, because specialists are valuable in any field, especially if they are niche specialists.

Preparing for a marathon in b2b lead generation 

If you’re not in a position to demonstrate either localness or niche in the near future, be prepared for a long run. It’s not that your offering has to be so much better than your competitors, or that the dream overseas client you can attract doesn’t exist and won’t be reached by your email/message on LinkedIn. Simply acquiring customers through outbound methods will require more effort from you.

When starting your preparations, you need to consider several factors:

1. Do I have time to create and verify databases? If your sales department has less than 3 people, believe me you don’t have time for databases. If you don’t outsource this to someone, you will soon realise that the 10h-20h you spend sifting through records with data downloaded from LinkedIn is cumbersome and an unverified database is worth as much as nothing. 
2. Do I know how to set up a campaign and use the campaign tools – it would seem that most tools are so intuitive that no special knowledge is needed to use them. But are you sure? Are you confident that when you press the ‘send’ button, you will not be blocked for SPAM, automating your actions on LinkedIn? Are you sure your designed messages are GDPR-compliant? Offer attachment properly prepared? If the answer to the last one is yes, then know that you must not send out offers until you are asked to do so. Better to outsource your campaign to professionals.

3. How large is the group I am sending messages to? Is it large enough to allow me to test?

Once you have the above behind you, you can prepare your psyche for the messages that will appear as part of your campaign response.

1. The less niche/specialised the service/product the more ‘silence’. A bad campaign does not mean you will get a lot of negative responses. You may not get responses at all. How then will you know what to improve? A lack of response with any readership, means the market doesn’t trust you – change your domain from .pl to .com, rent a virtual office in Dallas – if only to see if it makes a difference. 
2. Negative responses. Don’t be discouraged when they tell you to stop writing. There will always be a few such people out of the several hundred you write to. Look for reasons for refusal in the ‘no’ responses:

A. “decisions are made by head office” – maybe the positions of the recipients need to be changed,

B. “we are already served by competitors”. – It is worth speaking up at another time, the person who employed the competitor may have changed, the competitor may also have failed, in any case the target group is good if the competition is already here.

C. “we don’t need your services, we have our own solution” – get back to another person in that organisation in a while, no solution is forever

3. Positive answers. Firstly, you can’t miss them. Secondly, don’t expect spectacular success right away. If you even have 2 leads per month and don’t even manage to get beyond the first conversation and initial offer, then after a quarter you already have a list of at least 6 companies who have read your offer, and after 6 months 12. By the law of statistics 1/10 of the offers go through. 

Lead Nurturing 

No lead should be used just once. If only because you paid to generate it. If you used an external company to generate outbound leads, its cost averaged between $39 and $400 (you divide the amount of the invoice by the number of leads), and if you operate on your own, or have only one merchant at your disposal, the cost rises to as much as $1000 per lead ((merchant’s salary x time needed to handle the campaign and build the database + tools)/number of leads). 

Since the cost is so high, and all that is needed to renew contact is to plan the form in which it will happen, isn’t it worthwhile to keep in touch for as long as you can?

We run lead-nurturing campaigns quarterly as part of an external Pre-Sales Manager service we call Market Fit. If you are acquiring leads yourself, use any CRM to schedule this contact even if you have to do it manually.

A side effect of renewed contact in this way will be the relationship so sought after in b2b contacts. It will be stronger the more unforced conversation accompanies the renewed contact. Don’t worry, you only need to contact each lead once a quarter and include in your plans that the contact dates do not coincide with holidays, holidays, religious or national holidays. 

You can even write with someone every day if you have something to write about, just follow a few rules:

1. Don’t propose a business: You win when the lead figures out on their own how they would like to work with you. You contact so they remember you.
2. Be helpful, write what’s new with you, offer to exchange knowledge. 
3. If an assignment comes along that’s small but within your remit, complete it: any assignment, even a crap one, is an opportunity to show off your skills, and an option for at least 3 business referrals afterwards. And after all, referrals are the fastest way to contracts.
4. Don’t be discouraged, if you are serious about entering a new market where you don’t have a portfolio then expect that it may take up to two years.
5. Nothing by force – are you on your own, not yet employing salespeople? We will advise you on how you can strengthen your operations so that additional leads can happen to you in the pursuit of referrals.