Lead Generation Process: The Simplest Flowchart for the Most Effective Results

Published by Jamie Finch on May 5, 2021

Updated on 7th June, 2023.

Generating leads is an essential part of the sales workflow for every business. A lead is typically defined as a person or company that might become a customer at some point in the future.

While lead generation can differ for different businesses, the intent remains the same—get as many people to buy your products or services as possible. While this sounds simple, the entire process is quite cumbersome and requires too much effort. Prospects must be nurtured at various stages to persuade them, evoke eagerness, and make them take the desired action.

In this blog, we aim to decode different aspects pertaining to lead generation, the important workflows, and the process to maximize results.

But, let’s start with the basics first

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting potential customers into leads. These ideally include people who’ve shown interest in your product or service. It usually involves capturing their contact information for further engagement. Which may include their name, phone number and/or email address.

For instance, a beauty brand trying to increase its customer base may run a lead generation program by offering freebies to anyone who shares details of three or more women.

So, what are the different types of lead generation methods? We have highlighted the most effective ones below.

Different Types Of Lead Generation Methods

To generate leads effectively and efficiently, multiple strategies can be used. Let’s take a look at some of them:

Content Marketing: Craft and distribute relevant and valuable content via blog posts, infographics, e-books, and videos. It helps attract and engage potential leads.

Social Media Marketing: Leverage social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube, and more to share relevant and topical content, engage with the potential audience base, and drive traffic to either your landing page(s) or website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Use this to optimize website content and structure. Use the right set of keywords to rank high on SERP. This not only helps improve your visibility but attracts traffic organically and generates potential leads.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: Run paid ads on social media platforms and search engines like Google. Display ads related to your products and services to increase demand, entice prospects, and convert them into potential leads.

Email Marketing: It is an age-old lead generation technique, involving sending personalized messages, newsletters, or promotional offers to prospects to convert them into leads.

Referral Programs: It is another technique to generate leads and involves encouraging existing customers to refer friends, colleagues, or family and incentivizing them for each lead gained.

Webinars and Events: Hosting webinars, online or offline events, workshops, or even seminars can serve as a great way to share valuable information, establish brand authority, and capture lead information.

Partnerships and Affiliates: Collaborate with businesses or affiliates and leverage their customer base to generate high-intent leads for both your business and theirs.

The Transition of Leads through the Buying Journey

The acquisition of a new lead is just the start of the sales process. Ensuring that these prospects convert into paying customers demands building a strong, seamless and leakage proof sales funnel. This is because each lead will go through a journey from the point of first contact with the company to the point where they make a purchase. If the funnel here is perfect, then lead to conversion rate will always be high.

Here are the six main stages a lead funnel can be broken down into —

Prospect Stage: At this stage, an individual or a business expresses interest in your product or service by reading a blog or subscribing to a resource on your website.

Lead Stage: Here, a company maintains a database of individuals who may or may not be interested in your product or service but are worth engaging with.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) Stage: This is when a prospect has shown interest in your product or service. They are considered more likely to buy than other leads, although the probability remains fifty-fifty. These leads are generated by the marketing team and deemed qualified by Marketing.

Sales Qualified Lead SQL Stage: During the SQL stage, a prospect is almost convinced and is considered qualified by the sales rep.

Opportunity Stage: At this point, a sales rep has gathered all the necessary information from a sales-qualified lead to move forward with the deal.

Customer Stage: The final stage in the lead generation funnel is where a prospect makes the purchase and converts into a customer.

Image Source: Sales Whale

Based on this information, we can now illustrate the importance of a lead generation process. Read on to find out!

The Importance of a Lead Generation and Processing Mechanism?

As highlighted above, leads are at different levels of readiness during their journey throughout the buying process. If you approach a lead before they are ready to buy, you are not likely to get the response you are looking for and you may end up scaring them away. In contrast, if you have a lead that is ready to buy and you leave it on the table until it is too late, they might end up changing their mind!

Thus, it is important to process leads to help extract maximum value from them; to work with them according to where they are in the process personally.

Below is a workflow that helps outline the process of taking a raw lead through the journey to becoming a customer.

The Lead Generation Workflow

The ideal lead generation workflow is a seven-step process, as illustrated below:

But what do each of these steps mean? Let’s take a closer look.

Lead Acquisition

The first step of a lead generation workflow is lead acquisition. Now, there are various ways of acquiring leads, perhaps the most common is which is PPC advertising and SEO. The prospect will typically spot an ad for something they are interested in and click on it. The prospect will then be directed to a landing page or other asset where they are asked to sign up for more information on the product, news on promotions and other deals, and similar. Different methods are used to help encourage the prospect to share their personal details. One such method is known as a lead magnet which is often in the form of free content (like an eBook)—provided the prospect signs up.

Another way to acquire leads is by building a sales funnel, the organic or unpaid way. For instance, software as a service (SaaS) companies can build a SaaS sales funnel by relying less on paid ads and creating SEO-optimized and valuable content. Every piece of content should appeal to its target audience, getting the SaaS brand in front of them at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Hence, it is necessary to develop content that generates organic traffic and converts cold prospects to SaaS users. Once you master this strategy, you will attain a scalable sales funnel that converts leads exponentially.

Lead Nurturing

When a lead is first acquired, they will likely have some interest but still be some distance from being ready to buy. This means that marketing will need to nurture them; educate them and answer any questions they might have. This is where lead nurturing comes in as the second step. Nurturing leads can be done in a variety of ways, one of the most common of which is with drip campaigns that involve sending relevant information to the prospect according to their behaviors and other factors.

Lead nurturing will also often involve remarketing. Remarketing means using ads to reach back out to prospects that have visited your site but not taken any action. It is a great way of reminding people you are still there. In addition, remarketing can help in lead generation and conversion. For instance, an online store can reduce shopping cart abandonment by showing the products to the user while navigating the app or sending an in-app notification or email that the products are still available and waiting for checkout.

Marketing Lead Qualification

Acquiring and nurturing leads are the topmost objectives of any lead generation. However, success of any lead-gen campaign can only be determined through lead qualification. In addition to nurturing a lead, lead qualification also falls under the responsibilities of the marketing team. This means ensuring the prospect is genuinely interested and almost ready to buy the product. Qualifying also means ensuring the prospect is in a position financially to make a purchase and that the contact is the person making the decision.

The importance of speaking with the decision-maker cannot be understated. If the contact is not the decision-maker then they will need to report back to the person who does make decisions. However, that person has not been through the same nurturing process that the contact has. This makes it a lot less likely a sale will be made and trying to make a sale to the wrong contact can end up with the prospect being lost altogether.

So, how can a marketer or brand connect with the right person? To reach the decision-maker, you can request your contact to arrange a virtual or face-to-face meeting or provide you with the person’s contact details. Your first contact may not be qualified as a marketing lead; however the individual can be an excellent bridge to the decision-maker.

Sales Transfer

The fourth step in a lead generation workflow is a bridge stage known as sales transfer. What does this mean?

Once a lead has been qualified by marketing, it needs to be passed on to sales. This is what this stage involves. Sales transfer is an important step because it prevents the sales team from wasting time by talking to each and every lead. Marketing can use a tool like Salespanel to qualify leads using segmentation and lead scoring and automatically transfer them to sales when leads are marketing qualified.

Sales Lead Qualification

While marketing is expected to qualify a lead, sales will also often perform their own qualification check. This makes for the fifth stage of the lead generation workflow, referred to as sales qualification. It may involve somebody from sales giving the prospect a call to ask them more questions and evaluate their readiness to make a purchase. The process also helps to prep the prospect further for a sale to help ensure they are ready when an offer is made.

If the lead is not fully qualified yet then it does not necessarily mean the prospect is lost. Sales can find out the reason why the prospect is not ready and, if needed, pass them back to marketing who can get back to the task of nurturing the prospect until they are ready to buy.

Conversion

Of course, the ultimate task for sales is to convert the lead into a customer. Or, in other words, compel them to buy the product. The conversion stage entails negotiating with the customer regarding price and terms and conditions to try and come to an agreement. This step also involves any activities that the sales team may carry out to develop and maintain a good relationship with the customer. This is because there will often be other sales opportunities further along the line, such as other products, and upgrades to products the customer has already purchased.

Customer Retention

Once you have acquired a customer, you will need to work on keeping them. You can employ various strategies to help ensure that your customers stay loyal to you.

• Customer Services:Things will occasionally go wrong! However, what really matters is how a company deals with problems when they do occur and how they make things right for their customers.With the help of a good customer service department, a business can overcome any issues that occur, helping to keep the customer happy. In a sense, having problems arise can even work in the company’s favor as it’s an opportunity for the company to show it does have their customer’s best interests at heart.
• Loyalty Rewards: Loyalty reward systems are very popular. They help companies let their customers know they are appreciated, encouraging the customer to stick around for longer. Loyalty rewards are also great for driving extra revenue as they encourage people to take up deals and make purchases they might otherwise not have taken.
• Feedback Requests: Feedback, good or bad, can be instrumental in helping you to keep your customers on board.For one, thing, people appreciate being given the opportunity to voice their opinion. For another, the feedback you receive can help you to maintain high standards and continue delivering what the customers want. Try not to reject negative feedback. If anything you should embrace it. See it as your customers telling you how to deliver quality service and product, helping you to keep them for long into the future.

Last but not least, let’s look at some of the best tips for succesful lead generation.

Best Tips For Successful Lead Generation

To create a successful lead generation process for your business, you can start by following the tips mentioned below:

1. Define Your Target Audience: Generating qualified leads requires a thorough understanding of your ideal customer persona (ICP). Analyzing variables like demographics, interests, behaviors, and pain points can help you create targeted content and messaging that resonates with potential customers.Furthermore, once you have zeroed in on your ICP, you can dive deeper into customer data and segment your target audience into specific groups based on their characteristics. This can be especially helpful if you sell different products and services. Using customer segmentation, you can optimize your marketing campaigns to develop personalized campaigns that target specific audiences.
2. Research Your Competitors: Studying the marketing successes and failures of your competitors can provide you with valuable insights you can use to craft a distinctive lead generation process for your business.For instance, a SaaS company might analyze a competitor’s website to see which keywords they rank for and optimize their content to target these or related keywords. They might also study their competitors’ social media presence to understand what types of posts engage the audience most and replicate successful tactics. In addition to this, you can examine the customer reviews of any competing brand in the same niche to uncover pain points or needs that their products don’t address, enabling your brand to create tailored marketing messages resolving those issues. Thus, competitor analysis reveals gaps in competitor strategies that you can leverage to draw in more leads.
3. Create a Lead Generation Plan: Once you are aware of your target audience and their needs and problems, you should craft a proper lead generation plan. What does that involve?You can start by setting clear and measurable goals pertaining to the number of leads you want to generate. Following this, you should create a robust content strategy. Free content that delivers value is one of the best ways to guide users to your landing page. This can include informatie blog posts, lead magnets like eBooks and white papers, engaging webinars, and eye-catching social media posts. Sending regular emails can also be a great way to attract leads. Besides content, you can also offer discounted (or free!) product trials, set up referral or loyalty programs, organize industry events, or collaborate with other creators and businesses to generate leads.
4. Implement Marketing Automation: While quality is essential, you need to target lead generation at scale if you want to establiush your business as an industry-leading brand. This is where marketing automation comes in.Marketing automation tools increase efficiency and save time by streamlining and automating repetitive marketing operations. For instance, you can design customized email messages with email marketing automation software by taking into account the demographics and behavior of your target prospects. Based on their characteristics, you can score your leads and prioritize high-intent prospects. It also makes lead nurturing workflows automatable, guaranteeing prompt and relevant communications that move prospects down the sales funnel. Besides this, marketing automation software can be used segmenting audiences, tracking customer behaviors, and analyzing social media and ad campaign performances to drive more effective lead generation.
5. Analyze Outcomes To Optimize Results: Lead generation is an ongoing process, which is why it is important to track the progress of your initiatives. To do this, you need to first determine your key performance indicators (KPIs).Monitoring click-through rates, for example, can help you understand what proportion of prospects visited your landing page and converted into leads. Lead quality is also a crucial KPI that can help you evaluates the potential and relevancy of leads generated. Conversion rate optimization is another metric that focuses on the effectiveness of your landing pages, lead forms, and overall site usability in generating leads. Improving this can drastically maximize the results of your lead generation strategies. Analyzing such metrics can provide you with data-driven insights that help identify roadblocks or opportunities in the lead generation process and help you maximize results.

Conclusion

Generating revenue involves a lot more than just telling people you have something and waiting for them to buy your product or service. It is a whole series of processes within processes, each of which leads up to the next process and is part of an overall sales and marketing campaign. Furthermore, a sale does not mean the process is over—rather, it is simply the beginning of another process that can go on throughout the customer lifecycle.

What we have provided above is a brief outline of a typical flowchart of these processes and how they tie in with each other. It shows how different departments will need to work together and how those at the very beginning of the process are essential for those at the end. If you were to follow this outline as a guide, then you would be e well on your way to generating more revenue in the short term and the long term.

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B2B Lead Generation Strategies and Tools for 2021