What is B2B Lead Generation?

B2B lead generation is the process of capturing interest in products and/or services in order to gain more potential buyers. Sales and marketing teams use many different methods to capture interest from potential buyers. Sales teams use methods such as outbound phone and email prospecting, events, tradeshows, etc. to capture interest from companies. Marketing teams their marketing website, landing pages, content marketing efforts, etc. to capture buyer interest.

Discovering Leads and Enriching Information on Leads

Lead generation efforts can be split into two objectives: discovering leads and enriching the information on leads. The goal for discovering leads is to identify companies that demonstrate purchase intent signals. When a company is identified, sales and marketing teams’ objective then transitions to enrich the information on the company that has shown purchase intent signals. Sales and marketing teams can enrich company information by using firmographic data, such as company’s industry, domain, headquarters, annual revenue, etc. Purchase intent data can also help enrich the profile of information about a company such as showing interest in a particular product and/or services.

How to Capture Lead Information

There are many different ways that companies capture lead contact information in order to further pursue potential buyers. In an account-based marketing strategy, the main methods to capture lead information are:

Marketing Website and Landing Page Form Fills

Marketing teams use their marketing website’s contact us form and landing pages to capture buyer interest. Forms give marketers the ability to capture interest when potential buyer are learning about their company’s products and/or services.

Outbound Sales Prospecting

sales teams capture lead information when outbound prospecting by logging their interaction and intelligence in a sales development tool such as a CRM tool. For example, after a consultation with a prospect, sales reps can log the pain points that the prospect expressed.

Anonymous Website Visitor Tracking

When visitors do not fill out a marketing website form and do not reach out to a sales rep, sales and marketing teams can still track website visitors to analyze if a visitor is showing purchase intent. Anonymous website visitor tracking allows marketing and sales teams to track the companies that visit their website. This purchase intent lead information can be logged to a CRM tool.