Today the reality of information technology is that it has influenced almost every business organization. With the progression of innovative technology each and every angle of business is impacted significantly, and one of the areas that technology has affected the most, however, is the IT Lead Generation domain.
Trying to bring in customers for an ever-growing IT industry?
Well, there is no denial of the fact that to generate a constant supply of IT leads in a competitive market is a backbreaker. But without information technology sales leads, the firm could remain desk-bound and in-operative, leading towards declination in annual revenue.
Everyone will agree on this!
“Making your prospects feel like they have an exclusive membership in a club makes lead generation positive customer experience,” in the words of Eric Brower, Co-founder, Market Bright
Generating sales leads for an IT company is indirectly an act of investment to grab the interest of people in a company and its products. Information technology is a challenging and ever-changing industry and the job of generating quantity and quality IT sales lead will always be importunate.
Generating quality sales leads in this ever-evolving and advanced IT industry is an intimidating task but to keep this industry growing there has to be good marketing team in place. Tyson Zahner, a successful entrepreneur, and an attraction marketing specialist says that “Good marketing is not promoting what your thing is, but promoting valuable information that would attract the kind of person who would want or need your thing.”
Most people have drastically overcomplicated IT sales lead generation process. The truth is that there are only two ways to generate sales leads. And all those strategies and tactics can be broken down and categorized into just one of these two buckets. One is Prospecting (the active side of lead generation) and other is Marketing (the passive side of lead generation), the most preferred method for managed IT service sales lead generation in 2019.
Talking about successful IT sales leads, it’s important to mention about the world of digital technology that has accelerated the resourceful tactics and techniques to generate technical sales leads and managed service sales leads more expertly. Holding on to a job of Information Technology Lead Generator, requires great creativity, consideration to detail, self-motivation, and a whole lot of stamina.
It’s difficult to stand out of the crowd, but with effective and convincing IT sales lead generation tactics, you position yourself as an expert authority that people would actually want to work with and buy from, which will make you much more valuable and give you a competitive edge over every other marketer who is in a similar business.
Let’s learn how to generate some latest, applicable and sales-ready leads for IT marketers.
CLASSIFY ENTIRE ADDRESSABLE MARKET
Work on setting realistic goals before moving ahead with the sales process. For effective lead generation, it is very important to identify and define the geographical boundaries and countries you want to target and further divide it by company size, industry type, and employee count. Secondly, to meet your target sales quota frequently put this point into consideration and keep counting on:
Calls you make; Leads you generate; and Your average sales cycle length.
“A goal properly set is halfway reached”- Zig Ziglar, American Author and Motivational Speaker
TEST YOUR PRODUCT EFFICIENCY
Being 100% confident about your product and its usability is good but not always! Before making any confident claim in your sales and marketing materials, it is always important to test the product efficiency. Is your product successful in its task compared to others in the market? Does the product performance meet the customers' requirement in the given time frame? Is it the only software solution that is trending in the market? Test your product on all these parameters and share the result publicly.
NEWS-JACKING RELEVANT INDUSTRY AFFAIR
In recent years with the growth of digitalization, News-jacking is set to amplify your sales and marketing success, especially in the IT industry.
Now, the question arises- How could it help in generating IT sales lead?
B2B inbound marketing is the perfect platform to generate IT sales leads online getting newsjacking into action. If you are aware of an announcement regarding new technology, be prepared to research and collect relevant information about the new regulation or technology before the news breaks.
Outline the format of the content and focus on what your customer needs to know. Accordingly, select the medium of presentation very carefully keeping the content type in mind. It can be an e-book or slide presentation or a comparison sheet to frame the difference between the existing technology and the new one.
It is essential to work quickly, but you must also look after the accuracy of your content information. Being proactive is good but it won’t help in the long run if there is any flaw in the information. It is always recommended to proofread carefully before publishing.
Once the content is ready to shoot up, check with your inbound marketing strategy and look for the perfect opportunity to promote the hottest information to your target audience through a blogpost, social media updates, and outbound emails.
Wait and see how it twists today’s news into tomorrow’s sales leads.
VIDEO MARKETING FOR LEAD GENERATION
Have you ever tried closing a deal using video marketing? Does your lead generation strategy consist of various video marketing steps?
Well, it won’t be wrong if we mention that the video space is turning more aggressive in recent years simply because it is a more effective and engaging medium for lead nurturing in the IT industry.
“Video marketing is the most effective way for you to get someone’s attention and engage them for a substantial period of time. Keeping someone engaged is the best and quickest way to gain their trust. Gaining trust is the only way to convert your audience into happy, long-term clients/customers/subscribers.” – David Grimes- Career Meteorologist
But what videos should you be creating to convert your leads into customers?
Videos today should be an important part of your entire business strategy. It should be made keeping the audience or customers in mind empathizing with their unique issues. You can create videos to show off your brand personality, videos related to your product demos, highlighting the benefits of your software over your competitors, in regards to user-friendliness and customer support. Create customer testimonials and case studies with true-life examples about how you fulfill customer needs. Level up your IT sales lead generation process and use videos in your emails that help increase conversion.
DRIVING QUALITY LEADS ON LINKEDIN
Have you ever used LinkedIn for IT sales lead generation?
Well, LinkedIn is an amazing way to source qualified leads from a wide network of professionals.
According to HubSpot, LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead generation than Facebook or Twitter. LinkedIn is a leading professional networking hub for all kinds of professionals, students and influencers from different industries. Therefore, using LinkedIn for generating IT sales leads can be undoubtedly productive. With the use of professional demographic data, you can target the right people to build an account-based marketing campaigns on with a relevant audience.
“There are targeted discussion groups on LinkedIn for almost every niche imaginable. These are typically full of people looking for support and answers. Give your expert knowledge freely, and start relationships in these groups — you’ll quickly become a go-to source and will generate new leads for your business.” ~ Patrick Conley, Automation Heroes
Keep optimizing your LinkedIn profile and make sure that it resonates with your ideal prospects and clients. Establish yourself as an authority with quality content and reliable information, to give potential prospects more reasons to trust you. This is absolutely essential to your LinkedIn lead generation success. Be aggressively active and pay attention to trigger events that give opportunities for natural engagements.
“With targeted marketing campaigns on LinkedIn, we received seven times as many inbound inquiries from potential customers than we had used conventional methods.” Kyung-Heon Kim-Vice President, Head of Energy Solutions (ES)
As mentioned above, there are many more strategies or say tactics that can be practiced to generate information technology sales leads. But each and every one of them requires testing and manpower for proper implementation and productive results.