Generating good leads is of paramount importance for every business. Leads help the business in prospering as the leads are nurtured and handled by the marketing team and sales team respectively. If lead generation is done rightly it can deliver high Return on Investment. The whole process of generating leads, nurturing them and transforming them into a customer is what is known as the lead generation funnel.
However, not a lot of businesspersons know about this in detail. However, knowing this is essential as lead generation companies UK use this immensely.
So, in this blog, we acquaint you with the nitty gritties. Take a look.
Lead Generation Funnel
Just like a real funnel, the lead generation funnel has a whole process involved that has a large list of names and contacts in the beginning. When the customers reach the end of the funnel, they become a sales lead as they are sent from the lead generation funnel to sales funnel. Such funnel is helpful in finding out who the best leads are and who are the closest to being a customer and who need more nurturing for becoming a customer.
Also Read: How to increase revenue using Lead Generation Services?
Various campaigns and strategies are devised for optimizing the results. The basic lead generation elements are as follows.
Stage 1: Awareness
The inbound telemarketing efforts are done to bring traffic. The inbound telemarketing efforts include SEO, content marketing, and paid advertising and social media marketing. When the traffic comes to the website, they are often asked to fill a form or sign up so that the leads can be fetched. Doing this too early will make the leads scare away. This may also clog the funnel as the leads have been involved way too early in the process.
Stage 2: Names
This stage involves writing the names of the leads. These names are not exactly leads but they are the ones that have reacted to the marketing efforts you have made. In this step, you enter the names and their email and other contact information. Ideally, every call centre service provider should also seek permission to pass on the information further to these leads from them.
Stage 3: Engagement
This is the next step in the sales funnel. In this, you have to make prospective leads take some action. So, in order to make the leads, real leads you need to entice them. Make them sign up for a newsletter, become a part of a webinar, download an e-book, or make them go to landing pages.
Before proceeding to the next step just make sure that the leads that they are being nurtured, that pieces of information will be shared with them every now and then. At this point, only those leads stay that are actually interested.
Stage 4: Target or Prospects
In this step, all the leads that you have now can be given scores on the basis of their reaction to the information you share and the steps they have initiated to become a customer. Every step like checking emails and not marking them as scam should have different scores. Lead scoring helps you in ascertaining who your ideal leads are. The leads that will reach the set limit of lead score get closer to becoming a customer.
Also Read: 6 Simple B2C Lead Management Tips followed in UK companies
Stage 5: Marketing Qualified Lead
When a target has got a high lead score that lead can further be transferred to the marketing team. Lead generation companies UK say that at this step the leads are actually qualified as till this point they have shown quite a lot of interest in the products and services. Passing every lead irrespective of it hitting the desirable lead score will only lead to wastage of time and efforts of the marketing and sales team. This is why it is important to pass on qualified leads only.
Stage 6: Recycled
Now no matter how good your marketing efforts are, there will always be some leads that would not get qualified no matter what. This situation where a lead has shown interest initially, but changes all of a sudden occurs when he is not ready to become a customer yet. However, this should not stop you from making efforts. Such leads are often sent to the recycled leads data by the lead generation companies UK. They then should be fed continuously with emails and other marketing strategies. Sooner or later, they will become a qualified sales lead.
After this, when the sales team contacts the person, you can get a better idea of if he is ready to be a sales qualified lead. Then if the prospect will clear this level in the funnel, he will be given exposure to a lot of marketing and sales thing and would finally become a customer.
In short, lead generation companies UK and abroad just need to make use of the three lead generation pillars carefully which are lead capture, lead qualification and lead nurturing, If all these three will be done rightly, most of the prospects will turn into customers.