We know that quality leads are the lifeblood of any marketing campaign, but finding the most promising ones is a balancing act.
Fail to properly scale your leads, and you will find your prospects quickly dry up, but overdo the lead volume, and you will likely end up with a CRM full of worthless contacts.
At the heart of any successful lead scaling exercise sits the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
That’s because without a clear picture of who you are trying to target, all the other parts of your lead-generating scaling will become unfocused and scattergun.
However, get the ICP right, and you will pull off the balancing act of scaling your leads while maintaining quality.
Here’s how to do just that.
Identify Your ICP
It can’t be overstated how important your ICP is when it comes to scaling quality leads.
Without an accurate picture of your ideal customer base – in terms of who they are, what they do, what they are looking for, and the status of their current technology stack – your lead generation campaign will likely go awry.
Indeed, it’s not an overstatement to say that without an accurate ICP, you will have no real idea of what a quality lead really is.
As such, understanding your ‘best’ customers’ motivations and traits is imperative, as is understanding the common denominators that underpin them.
Build Volume
Just because you want quality leads doesn’t mean that volume isn’t also important.
You can only find those gold nuggets by panning for them, and that means filling the top of your funnel with potential leads.
SEO, webinars, gated and ungated thought leadership content disseminated via a trusted content syndication company like Headley Media, and outbound calls all have a role to play in filling the top of your funnel and keeping it fresh.
Establish Precision Channels
Your volume leads can then be fed into precision channels.
ABM, SDR outreach, LinkedIn campaigns, and retargeting all have to be laser-like precise if the quality of the leads isn’t to fall off further down the sales funnel.
Furthermore, the data these channels give you about who does and doesn’t interact with your campaigns will tell you a lot about the quality of your leads, and which are worth pursuing and which aren’t.
Create Feedback Loops
Lead scaling isn’t a linear operation.
Marketing needs to be kept in the loop once the leads have been passed on to the sales department.
Data on conversion rates, funnel status and dead ends need to be fed back to marketing teams so it can refine its campaign and bring the sales department better leads going forward.
Conclusion
It’s important to bear in mind that quality lead generation is an iterative process.
Few companies get it right the first time, and businesses, priorities and global impact are constantly evolving – what is classed as a quality lead one year may have shifted by the next one. Growing B2B leads without losing quality will often need constant refinement and feedback from sales and marketing to find the sweet spot of quality and quantity.
