How To Modernize Your Industrial Lead Generation Process

If your business operates primarily or entirely inside the industrial business-to-business sphere, you may be feeling left out of the online revolution in marketing. The amazing new tools for advertising, generating leads, and making sales on the Internet don't seem to apply to your field. Is the industrial sector really unsuited for modern lead generation strategies? Or have you perhaps not been adjusting the latest lead-gathering techniques to suit your specific needs?

End The Beef Between Marketing And Sales

In an awful lot of companies there's a very tense demilitarized zone separating the marketing professionals from their counterparts in sales. Each of these teams is liable to catch the blame when sales figures go flat or decline, and in most cases they won't hesitate to blame each other. You need to foster collaboration instead of finger-pointing. Good marketers and good sales people are constantly studying their fields and they're also constantly compiling statistics on what does and doesn't work. Get your two teams to start looking at and learning from each other's numbers!

Emphasize Persistence

One of the marketer's favorite complaints about the sales person is that he or she drops a hard-won lead after investing a minimum of effort in conversion. While marketers tend to overstate the extent of the problem, there IS a problem here. When you're chasing leads you mustn't lose sight of the larger goal. What you're ultimately after is more sales. Feeding more leads into the sales funnel will achieve this goal, but so will strengthening the funnel so that your conversion rate improves. Dig up more leads and then work on them harder!

Study Your Customers

Don't get the impression that what you need to do is switch to high pressure sales tactics, though! In order to turn your sales funnel into a more effective conversion tool, you need to look at where your leads drop out of the funnel. This is where sales and marketing can really work together. Sales has the first-hand knowledge about the weaknesses of the sale process, and marketing has the expertise to fix the problems. You should also make sure you capture a complete picture of who your ideal customer is. This will help you target solid leads more efficiently. Learn more about benefits of manfacturing marketing.

Seek Out Customers And Help Them

You should pay attention to the order these suggestions have been presented in. First you need an effective team, then you need an effective sales process, then you need a well-researched profile of what your leads (i.e. potential customers) look like. Only after all of your tools are in place can you start hunting up fresh leads. When online marketing efforts fail for industrial companies, it's usually because they leap directly into the marketing without laying the proper groundwork. With ample preparation you can turn your marketers loose and let them build a strong positive presence for your company. If they do their jobs well, you'll eventually have valuable leads coming to you of their own volition!

Marketing your business and creating more leads in the industrial sector is really all about infrastructure. It's only when you company is prepared to take full advantage of good leads that you'll have success finding them online.