If you’re struggling to keep your pipeline full, now is the time to optimize your lead generation process. This quick guide will walk you through how to get started.

What is the Lead Generation Process?

If you’re new to business, you might not even know what the lead generation process. In simple terms, it’s the way you:

  1. find new people who might be a good fit for your product or service,
  2. get their contact information so you can interact with them affordably (this is called lead nurturing), and
  3. eventually turn them into customers.

Advertisers rely on a concept called the sales funnel to visualize the process.

Say a person has submitted their details on your website or subscribed to your mailing list. At that point, they’ve entered your funnel. Now it’s up to you to create marketing outreach activities that will target the person and get them to buy your product. These can be anything from emails or ads to special and personalized offers.

Meanwhile, your marketing team will have to examine the probability of a specific lead becoming your customer. This can help you decide whether you want to focus your resources on them or not.

At the end of the process, you should review the funnel and optimize your lead generation process for better, more efficient results. Luckily, there are multiple ways in which you can do this!

Lead Generation Process Steps

The best way to optimize your lead generation process is to look at its different parts and figure out exactly where you can make improvements.

This process is complex and it will require the efforts of both your marketing and your sales departments.

As you plan the optimization process, consider which areas your marketing department should own and those that should go to sales. This will set clear expectations for your team and help with sales and marketing alignment.

Improve Your Response Time

One thing many business owners do not focus on is their response time – how long it takes to follow up with a lead. One of the primary ways you can optimize your lead generation process is to speed up your turnaround time.

Keep in mind that it is the leads who reach out to you. This means that, at some level, they are already interested in what you offer. But if you don’t reach out to them when they’re ready, then they might “cool down” and lose interest. Or find someone else to meet their needs.

Automation can help here. There are a lot of lead generation tools that can help you reach out almost instantly.

Don’t Let Rejection Bring You Down

Another rookie mistake you can make is to think that there’s a problem with your funnel after a couple of rejections. One of the best things you can learn about optimizing your lead generation process is that rejected leads are inevitable.

What really matters is your overall close rate. See what channels, content, landing pages, etc. are leading to the highest close rates and try to replicate those successes.

You should also create opportunities to grow and learn from rejected leads. Go back and explore what didn’t work in order to optimize your methods even further. Maybe you need more granular targeting, or your messaging needs work.

Think about all of these possibilities and work with your teams to create the best campaign possible. Remember that any insight you can get into the lead generation process is valuable – but only if you recognize it and utilize it.

About the Author

The content writer at Nifty, a powerful Wunderlist replacement, Petar Djordjevic is a Math student working to become a professional novel writer. In the meantime, he is learning about online writing, content optimization, and ways to boost clients’ website users’ experience.

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