How to build a system that you can use to generate more B2B leads

I was coaching a client earlier this week and he asked a really important question;

“I’m about to hire a sales person, what KPI’s should I set? How do I know that they are going to get results?”

This is a crucial question to ask when building your sales and marketing operation. You must build a sales and marketing team on a well defined sales process. A strong feedback and improvement loop will help you to generate more B2B leads and sales.

What’s more when you hire your first few team members, any one marketing or salesperson shouldn’t cover the whole sales process themselves. What’s better is to see the sales process as a series of specialised steps and you hire people to cover one step each;

How can I find out the best sales process for our company?

To help you answer this question, I’ve provided below the framework with which we build every sales process to help us generate more B2B leads in a consistent way;

1. Always build on established information
2. Set activity, quality and results goals
3. Hold your team to those goals
4. Diagnose what happened and continually learn more

I’ll beak these down and explain each of these below

Step one: Always build on what’s there already

This starts on the predication that the answer to making a lot of sales in your industry already exists. All you need to do is to uncover and use that information.

Start with what you know already

First, your existing customers;

• How did they find you?
• Why did they come to you?
• What event triggered them to enquire?
• How did you solve that problem?
• Why did they renew with you?
• Why didn’t they renew?

You may have 1 customer, you may have 1000’s of customers. But either way, you do have insight to be gleaned on this exact topic. You can generate more B2B leads by focusing on what works. Check out this blog we did on picking sales channels

Next, go to the enquiries which didn’t convert;

• How did prospects that didn’t convert find you?
• How quickly did they tell you no? Was it quick or did they string you along?
• Did they quibble on price? Did they seem like a nightmare to work with anyway?
• Were they really profitable opportunities and so you’d want to go after similar ones again in the future?
• Why did they say no?
• Have they gone with another supplier or do they still have the same problem?

Look at successful companies in your sector

What are your competitors doing? This isn’t just a checkbox bit of ‘market research’. This is more helpful than you think.

When you can compare this to your first hand experience, the advertising and sales material for your successful competitors of yours is a great indicator of what works.

Obviously don’t just copy it, but it’s important to study the channels, message and offers of your competitors. Why? Because it might give you clues about what you can do too;

• You’ll see something you do that they do as well and you’ll know it works – Do more of it
• There could be something they do that you don’t and you’ll want to try it out – Give it a small, limited trial to build some first hand experience in it

Bottom line, focus on what works already. We did a blog about this exact topic. Check it out to help you generate more B2B leads

Agree goals with your team & hold them accountable

In my experience, it’s useful to really involve your team in the goal setting process. As much as possible, it’s ideal for you to let them set their own goals, provided that they fit within the wider company goals. Here’s a few tips I’ve found to help you with this:

Don’t just ask for a number, ask for a story behind the goal

Let your team explain to you why a specific goal is realistic or achievable. Sometimes it’s easy to say a number like “We’ll get 100 clients this month” and agree to that because it sounds nice. But how will that be achieved? 

Asking for the story behind the goal and the basis on which they think it’s possible makes it easy to ‘sense check’. This way, you’d be able to have an open discussion about the number they say. For example, the “We’ll get 100 clients this month” you could conclude that;

• “100 clients makes sense because we have well tested activity and conversion metrics that shows that’s possible” or
• “Such a large figure actually seems unrealistic. Whilst 100 clients would be nice, based on previous results we could probably expect 50”

Set activity, quality and outcome goals

I don’t know what your KPI’s are, but here’s the 3 types of KPI you want

• Activity – minimum number of calls, messages, traffic, clicks, emails, etc you will take to make sure your message is put out there
• Quality – How do you measure how effective that message was? e.g. Call connectivity, Traffic Bounce, Open Rate, Abandoned Carts, etc
• Outcomes – Set a specific goal with the above 2 factored in

Essentially you want all 3 because then you’re doing the right amount, to the right quality with the right outcomes intended. Check out this blog on KPI’s for more information.

Hold your team to those goals

Break down a monthly goal into weekly and daily tasks. Then, agree daily catch ups where you remind them of the goal, ask their progress and (most importantly) what sticking points have they noticed? The more that you know about how to generate more B2B leads, the better.

Diagnose what happened and continually learn more

Record every aspect of your KPIs. Continually get feedback from your team about what they think could be done better. As a Sales & Marketing Manager, it’s your job to solve the problems that stop them from doing more. Always ask them if there’s anything they think could be done better. You can keep them working on their goals whilst you make it easier for them to hit their goals.

Review your performance, change your expectations and start again

Create habits to regularly review your performance and change your expectations based on this information. This takes you back to step one and the virtuous cycle of growth can continue.

Gather sales and marketing knowledge

Visit sales blogs like www.hubspot.com where you can get key insight into sales best practices from companies who have much bigger resource pools

Keep checking out your competition

Much like the above, keep checking out your competitors and what they’re up to. Continually compare this to what you know already to see how different techniques would work for you.

We can help you generate more B2B leads

If you are looking for help with pay on results lead generation, digital marketing and sales coaching feel free to get in touch. You can find out more about how to generate more B2B leads here