Lead Generation is mostly heard in the Sales and Marketing world. It is not new and existed in the business world forever. Throughout the years’ process of how companies generated leads have evolved drastically, fuelled by innovation.
Let’s define first the meaning of Lead Generation. According to Hubspot, Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated an interest in your company’s product or service.
The main objective is to engage a stranger (Prospect) and to make someone very interested in knowing more about products/tools/services (Lead) and then nurture the client until the client decides to buy or purchase your products/services.
What is a Lead?
A single person or organization that shows interest in the product or services that a company offers.
According to Marketo, a qualified prospect that is starting to exhibit buying behavior.
Clients who are interested share valuable information to sales representatives, example of information are Full Name, Product of Interest, Phone/Mobile Number, email address, and work schedule. Start using the Leads API here.
Types of Leads
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): A stranger who visits the company website and the engagement levels indicate that he is likely to become a customer. This is tracked from looking at the behaviors or level of engagement, such as website visits and communication of the customer.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQL): MQL should not be confused with Sales Qualified Leads. SQL is the next stage. Sales Qualified Leads are prospect clients that companies have invested time in research, investigation, and it means that this lead is a potential customer. The MQL is not ready to purchase, but SQL is at the buying stage.
Marketing and Sales always pursue a common objective, and it helps companies grow. Both worlds aligned together to create a perfect and winning strategy for a company to advance. Sales and Marketing alignment help the company understand their customer, receive feedback, better support, and implementation of customer feedback, most importantly, the better engagement between sales and marketing.
Sales are to grow business like coffee is to give you energy. In the business world, sales are the department that generates revenue. Sales leads are essential to the company, and it needs good sources to ensure the success of your sales team.
Sources to generate leads
Here are some of the sources to ensure your companies success in generating leads:
Referrals (Customer/Employee/Partner): The best Source of quality sales leads. It implies that clients trust and value you as a salesperson or company. Mostly they will suggest a specific LinkedIn connection or schedule a call with a network for the introduction. Also, Word of Mouth Marketing is the best way to gain more clients.
Reconnect with Former clients: Connect with past clients, inactive accounts, and rekindle the relationship.
Blogs: Way to educate customers about your products and services. Get emails from interested leads by signing up for your company.
Social Media and Professional Networking Sites: Social prospecting means finding potential clients. Examples of this site are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and more.
B2B Directories: One of the most popular online sources of business prospects is B2B Directories. It helps you to search and find your targeted prospects quickly.
Google Resources: Simple google search using keywords can yield company names, locations, and much more information.
Forums: Participation in forums can bring awareness to clients about your products/services. It allows potential clients to interact and share knowledge on the best solutions.
How to Collect High-Quality Sales Leads
There are a lot of ways to find new leads, but searching for a unique prospect that will turn out to be qualified is a different thing. Figuring out how to collect high-quality lead is perhaps the biggest challenge and win that a B2b Company can make. Companies would likely be seen Bad, Low, and high quality of leads and most salespeople would be likely to produce excellent leads. Great leads have a higher possibility of increasing good results. Here are some tips to obtain high-quality leads:
Great Data: Too little data will affect the development of your sales team’s performance. The first sign of a quality lead is excellent data. Knowledge about the lead’s business situation, organizational structure, and events. Knowing about the client’s information, ex. The phone number, email address, title, and spelling of the prospect’s name confirmed and validated is a great start to reach out to potential clients.
PreQualified: Prospect lead that undergoes analyzation and understood the products or services which meet general buying criteria.
Usage of Social Media/Professional Networking Sites to Connect and Engage for Company Advantage:
Social Media is a powerful channel for engaging and connecting with current customers. It provides several opportunities for small businesses to create conversations with prospective customers and generate new leads. It is Free to create a Facebook page, Twitter profile, LinkedIn company page, Pinterest account, or a YouTube page to attract and engage the audience, then filter them through the process to become leads.
Web Crawling Tool to Gather Data
Businesses always need to grow and find success to expand. Sales are the backbone of any business. Every sale starts with a lead. Companies need to continually update their pool of leads to find an ideal customer. Finding a lead is not easy.
The most crucial need for lead generation is information gathering. Information is needed to find high-quality sales leads. Correct and up-to-date information about potential lead, more information you have the more quality leads will be. Lead Generation is used repeatedly by companies across the globe to satisfy the increasing business requirements.
The competition level for most businesses has risen, and to get success, gaining information about customers’ desire and character as well as lead generation is a vital business necessity. Most companies nowadays are using Web Crawling. Web crawling is the process of fetching and extracting data from any web pages. This is an advantageous method of collecting data from any websites and putting it all in one place that can be easily used/analyzed. Thereby, web crawling can be a great way of extracting data from the internet. The information can be useful in the lead generation process.
Crawl Social Media Sites/Professional Networking Sites for Sales Lead/Lead Extraction with Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl)
Social Media Platforms/ Professional Networking Sites are beneficial for businesses to get steady leads to nurture and compete with other business.Crawling is very easy to use. Simply search the platforms or social media that prospects or potential buyers can be found, fetch the information needed, such as phone numbers, emails, title, name, headquarters, and more.Web crawling can help you collect thousands of leads within minutes.
Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) offers to crawl and to scrape tools to access internet data. We care about data; all of us love the freedom that the internet gives to obtain anything at any time, and that’s what we want to share and provide to the world. The internet should be open and accessible to everyone. Customers trusted us because of the quality of the service, the support, and how established we are as a company.
Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) is the answer to your crawling and scraping needs.
