Despite digital marketing’s upward trend, many businesses remain clueless about lead generation, much less know who specializes in generating leads. As a result, they might not know to turn to a lead generation specialist to increase conversion rates.
Yet, how many consumers of goods and services believe that having a website is valuable?
Rarely do you find a reputable business that doesn’t have a website. In any business networking, people hand out a calling card with their email and website addresses printed on it. Those who couldn’t afford to have a professional one would at least have a social media page like Facebook. Through these powerful channels, businesses can quickly generate leads.
What is Lead Generation?
Simply put, lead generation is the process of enticing prospects to connect with your business. Most businesses do this through advertising.
And now in the digital era, this can take the form of Google ads, such as those that pop up in the first three lines of your Google search result. Sometimes, an ad can pop up on Youtube while the potential customer waits for his video to play. If the ad generates interest, and the person clicks on it, you can say, it created a lead into your purchase funnel. This is an easy way to automate lead generation. It’s incredible how the internet could make such a huge difference. Compare it with hiring telemarketers and paying them by the number of calls or conversions.
So, if you can automate lead generation through social media, email marketing, and online advertising, is there a need for a lead generation specialist? Why would companies still hire them and pay them the average salary of 56,000 to 60,000 annually?
What Does a Lead Generation Specialist Do?
If you look at the job description for a lead generation specialist, companies hire them to do the following:
- Business development and assist in closing new client contracts
- Manage contract alerts and qualify leads
- Manage follow-up with prospects and leads opportunities
- Review customer profile forms to identify prospects
- Manage pre-qualification leads, and qualification of sales leads from email campaigns and direct mail campaigns
- Demand generation
- Answer incoming calls from consumers and determine eligibility for services
- Participate in training to improve communication skills
- Become an expert about the product or service
- Responsible for achieving telemarketer goals and objectives
- Call on existing customers to advise them of current products, point of sale service offerings
- Conduct a survey and generate a marketing strategy
- Track all appropriate outbound and inbound calls, and capture specific customer and product details related to the call
- Conduct pre-qualifying lead presentation to prospects
- Canvass target market areas
- Make initial contact with new business leads through phone calls
- Secure specific business intelligence information
- Contact prospects by phone to qualify sales leads
- Analyze and interpret data to improve accuracy, speed, and overall quality of sales lead
- Prepare, validate, analyze, and present all recurrent sales lead data
- Secures new contact and sales lead
A word on qualified leads
Some companies assign a wide range of tasks to a lead generation specialist. But appointing too many functions to a lead generation specialist to maximize their pay can work against you in the end.
In managing your leads, you need to know the difference between marketing qualified leads vs. sales qualified leads. Failing to differentiate the two can compromise not just your marketing strategy, but your overall business strategy.
In this video, I discuss the difference between marketing qualified leads vs. sales qualified leads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkDsLaYjsvY
How does it work?
Prospects initially hear about your business from one of your marketing and advertising efforts. This brings them to your sales funnel. They move on to become a marketing qualified lead as they gain interest in your brand.
Next, you need a consistent online presence so that prospective customers can distinguish your authority from the competitors. You can do this through email, social media, and newsletters. Then, you continue to build a relationship so that they can effectively become sales qualified leads. Once they indicate interest in learning more about the product, that’s when your marketing people can hand off the prospect to the salespeople.
There’s a delicate art that salespeople employ to close a deal. How often have you marketed yourself to a client, wooing and enticing them with coupons and discounts? And when they change their mind, you never follow up again. Perhaps you are a marketer but not a salesperson.
Sales representatives know when to back off and move forward after initial rejection. They strategize, test, and know when to plunge into the close.
Expecting a lead generation specialist to do all these and more for you may cost you more than if you hire a lead generation agency to automate the marketing plan and then train a sales professional to specialize in closing the deal.
So, Will Hiring a Lead Generation Specialist Benefit Your Business?
There are many schools of thought. But the best one is the one that fits your needs. Are you lacking in digital marketing skills? Are you looking to have a well-established online presence? Have you not yet maximized the automaticity that a website and social media platform can create so you can concentrate on the close?
Watch my video on how this is delicately handled by marketing and sales, and how these two groups must work in harmony to become successful at converting leads into sales.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkDsLaYjsvY
What are your options?
Many companies now see the advantages of outsourcing the digital marketing component of their marketing strategy. Hiring a third-party lead generation specialist can make your sales funnel flow more efficiently.
Your sales team will be focused on closing deals and generating sales instead of prospecting and qualifying, writing blogs, sending e-newsletters, and answering social media comments. They will do less cold calling with the quality leads they get from the marketing segment of your company.
Leave the Marketing to Us
Not sure how to navigate all the details of a solid digital marketing plan? We can help! Schedule a free business review here to find out how we help businesses grow. You can use these insights for inspiration, and let us do the marketing for you.
