B2B lead generation and the vantages of using professional lead generation companies to boost your sales pipeline

1. B2B lead generation and the vantages of using professional lead generation companies to boost your sales pipeline The biggest challenge in B2B marketing is generating leads. Without leads there is no clients, without clients there is no revenue, without any revenue there is no purpose to a business. No one can run a business without making sales and acquiring new customers. Even the best salespeople can’t make sales if they have no one to sell to but, and this is a very well-known fact, hard sellers hate finding people to sell to. Sales people love to go to meetings and close deals but they hate finding prospects to meet in the first place. This is where lead generation companies come into their own and, if a business choses the right outsource partner to work with, can prove to be an invaluable asset to an organisation. You will find very few hardened salespeople that are willing to get on the phone and dial 150 businesses per day to make just one or two appointments. Lead generators, however, love being on the phone and thrive on the challenge of getting past the gatekeeper to speak to a decision maker. Despite the fact the most decision makers won’t really be all that interested in what they have to say, those few that do are the golden calls that telemarketers live for. Having a strong pipeline of interested prospects and a healthy number of new businesses opportunities is well worth the investment in telemarketing. More prospects means more potential customers, more meetings for sales people means an increased chance of making a sale, more sales means in increase in revenue and on it goes. The sales cycle has to start somewhere and end somewhere but it won’t end at the point of the sale if new and interested parties are not being contacted form cold data to get the pipeline going. B2B lead generation is by no means easy. It may seem like a simple task, picking up the phone and calling 150 people in a day, but it is not as easy as it looks. Most business decision makers hate cold calls and do not even speak to most cold callers. Only the best and most experienced telemarketing agents have the skills to get round gatekeepers and engage a prospect in a dialogue. Once a prospect has been engaged, experienced telemarketers can usually tell within a matter of seconds if the person at the other end of the phone has a genuine interest, or need, in the product or service they are offering. Telemarketing has proved itself, time and time again, to be one of the top most effective methods of generating B2B leads. Adverts, social media, radio, PR, newspapers, web tools and other forms of marketing do not engage a potential client and provide the means to develop a relationship. It is much harder to ignore a voice at the end of the phone, it is human nature to feel empathy towards other humans, than it is to ignore a radio ad or a generic email. Sales and marketing teams must communicate, cooperate and interact with each other in order for the sales process to run smoothly and ensure that a business has the best chance of increasing revenue.