Every business leader wants to facilitate growth. No matter which industry or customer base you serve, you’ll constantly be searching for ways to increase revenue and unlock new opportunities. For businesses to grow and earn a profit, they need access to a constant stream of leads.
A lead generation team, working alongside your sales team, can help you to capture the potential customers you need to fill your pipeline. The members of this team, often consisting of marketing, sales, and demand generation specialists, ensure you can constantly attract new clients and revenue to your organization. The question is, how do you build a successful lead generation team?
The way you structure and guide your lead gen employees will influence how effective they are at driving results. Here’s how you can build and develop the perfect team.
What is Lead Generation
Not to be confused with “demand generation” which involves creating interest or excitement around your products and services, lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers to your business. The goal is to guide prospects into and through the buyer journey and sales funnel.
In the business landscape, leads come in a variety of forms, some more valuable than others. For instance, “Information Qualified Leads”, or IQLs, are the cold leads in the initial process of entering your sales funnel. They’re looking for information about your solution and its benefits.
Marketing Qualified Leads, or MQLs, are warmer leads who are already aware of your company or solution, and are looking for ways to leverage your products and services to solve problems. Finally, Sales qualified leads” are people who have already decided they have a need for your solution, and are ready to make a purchase. These are the leads that can be passed over to sales reps.
Why is Lead Generation Important?
So, why are leads important? In simple terms, without leads, you can’t earn sales.
Leads are the people who can turn into customers and advocates for your brand, helping your business to grow. With a lead generation strategy, you build visibility, and credibility for your business, while collecting interest from a relevant group of high-quality prospects.
An effective lead generation strategy ensures you can fill your sales pipeline with new potential customers consistently, increasing your revenue and profits.
Identifying Team Roles for Lead Generation
A lead generation team is essentially a group of employees who act as “hunters” for your sales reps. These professionals can have a range of responsibilities, but their core focus is on finding relevant prospects and driving them towards your sales funnel.
Every member of a lead generation team needs a clear understanding of the company’s USP and go-to-market strategy, the target audience of the brand, and the overall sales process.
While many different employees can participate in a lead generation team, from content creation experts to SEO specialists and market analysts, common roles include:
Demand or Lead Generation Directors
Directors or leaders of a lead generation team are the professionals responsible for guiding the rest of the employees in your business. They ensure alignment between your sales and marketing teams, help create strategies for lead and demand generation, and conduct market research.
These specialists can often work as marketing managers, sales managers, and coaches or mentors to other employees all at the same time. They know how to use technology and software to achieve lead generation goals, and set KPIs and metrics to help monitor success.
Lead Generation Strategists
Lead generation strategists are the people most responsible for collecting data and insights to drive your business strategies. They have a deep understanding of your market, and understand what “qualified leads” look like for your business.
Strategists can help to create ideal customer personas and profiles to guide other team members. They can also produce affinity maps for lead qualification, share demographic research, white papers, and case studies with team members, and host training sessions or webinars.
Content Creators
Content creation is one of the most common ways to generate leads in any business. The creation of valuable content, such as videos, search engine optimized blog posts, podcasts, and whitepapers can help to build brand awareness and generate demand for your solutions.
Content creators are responsible for creating these assets, and ensuring they help guide potential prospects through your sales funnel. They’ll often work with strategists to ensure the pieces they produce align with the pain points and goals of your ideal target audience.
Lead Generation Specialists
Lead generation specialists are professionals in a business landscape that focus exclusively on filling your sales pipeline with potential leads. They work with other team members throughout your organization to identify qualified leads, build and execute nurturing campaigns, and even devise strategies for retaining future customers.
Lead generation specialists can also help to advise the rest of your team members on how to reach out to potential consumers, or move them through the sales funnel using different strategies and resources.
Sales Development Representatives
Every member of your sales team can play a role in the lead development process, but SDRs generally have the biggest part to play in driving leads through the sales funnel. Sales Development Representatives prospect and quantify leads before handing them to a sales rep.
They use various methodologies, such as the “BANT” lead qualification strategy, before defining which leads are most valuable to your organization. SDRs don’t sell to leads directly, but they ensure your sales reps always have potential consumers to connect with.
Ways to Build a Lead Generation Team
There are a number of different ways to build and structure a lead generation team. Depending on the size of your business and your budget, you may choose to hire full-time employees, dedicated to specific lead generation tasks, such as content creation and sales development.
Smaller businesses sometimes take a more flexible approach. While they might hire full-time sales development representatives and marketing coordinators, they may also purchase the services of freelance content creators, strategists, and lead generation specialists.
However you choose to source and implement your team, the most important step in ensuring the structure works is creating unity among your employees. Bridging the gaps between sales and marketing specialists is crucial for effective lead generation.
Marketing teams can use their industry knowledge to provide sales professionals with resources and guides they can use to nurture and convert customers. Sales professionals can share their data with marketing teams to help them create content relevant to the pain points and goals of your target audience. Alongside ensuring alignment, it’s also important to ensure you invest in:
- Effective leadership: Good leadership is essential to the success of any business team. The leaders of your lead generation team should be able to keep professionals aligned around a shared vision, share valuable insights, and set clear goals for success.
- Collecting feedback: Listening to feedback from employees can have a significant impact on the success of your lead generation efforts. Paying attention to the information marketing and sales teams collect when interacting with prospects will make it easier to understand how to qualify leads, and nurture them throughout the sales funnel.
- Consistent Learning: The marketing and sales landscapes are constantly evolving, alongside trends and changes in consumer preferences. Ensuring your teams can constantly advance and improve their skills with training and development is essential.
Evaluating and Improving Your Lead Generation Team Performance
Figuring out how to structure teams for lead generation involves a careful assessment of the buyer journey, and the sales funnel process used by your organization. Once you’ve determined which team members you need to include in your team, from content experts, to strategists, it’s important to know how to benchmark and monitor their success for continued optimization.
Evaluating the performance of your lead generation team begins with knowing which key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor. The KPIs you monitor will vary depending on your business structure or goals, but common measurements include:
- Number of connections with decision makers: The decision maker in a business is the person with the buying power. If your lead generation teams are constantly getting stuck at “gatekeepers”, this is a sign that you’re not taking the right approach to finding, qualifying, and attracting leads. You may need to re-evaluate how you target potential consumers, and how you move them through the purchasing journey.
- Number of qualified leads: As mentioned above, not all leads are alike. While your instinct may be to track the total number of leads you generate, it’s more effective to pay attention to “qualified leads”. This helps to define the success your sales team and marketing team are having at pulling valuable, relevant prospects towards your business.
- Sales cycle completion rate: The ultimate goal of effective lead generation is to drive more sales for your business. A strong sales cycle completion rate suggests your sales reps are effective at converting qualified leads into paying customers. A low completion rate, on the other hand, could be a sign that you’re qualifying leads incorrectly, or that you need to conduct deeper research into your market.
- Client satisfaction and retention: In an ideal world, the leads you generate for your business shouldn’t just make one purchase and forget about your brand. They should be encouraged to make repeat purchases and advocate for your company, based on your approach to excellent customer service. Review testimonials and feedback from customers to determine whether you’re delivering on the promises your business makes.
- Return on Investment: ROI is probably the most obvious metric to track when determining the success of any business strategy. Think about how much revenue you’re earning from the leads you generate on a monthly or annual basis. Compare this number to the amount of money you spend on your sales processes, labor, and marketing strategies.
Developing Effective Lead Generation Teams
No business can thrive without access to a consistent stream of qualified leads. While it’s important to ensure you’re investing in retaining your existing customers, you also need a strategy that allows you to draw new potential clients to your organization on a regular basis.
A well-structured lead generation team can help companies to align their sales and marketing efforts, to fill the pipeline for future revenue. If you need help learning how to build, structure, and optimize your lead generation teams, join HSE today.
Our gamified training experiences offer an engaging way to learn all about the techniques businesses can use to optimize both lead and demand generation, and accelerate sales.
