How To Better Align B2B Lead Generation And Prospect Development

By Daniel Hussem - Director of Marketing for Troparé Inc.

Click here to read the original article on Forbes.com

Business-to-business (B2B) lead generation and prospect development are key skills that can drive superior sales growth. They are closely interconnected, as prospecting is an essential part of lead generation. But this link isn't always obvious to sales and marketing professionals.

The lack of understanding of their interdependence tends to complicate the relationships between sales and marketing team members. Forrester Research states that “if marketing and sales are not aligned and they do not collaborate, they will be disintermediated,” resulting in lost sales or costly delays.

Aligning B2B lead generation and prospect development requires strong cooperation, reliability and trust. Both sales and marketing teams need to work together to develop a set of specific abilities, customer insight, knowledge and practices that help launch campaigns, nurture leads, collect and analyze data, and convert prospects to new customers.

Building An Analytical Foundation

Big data has become a game-changing factor for sales and marketing in companies across the globe. Data is penetrating all spheres of business, and the success of the entire lead generation process now depends on the competence of the team.

Competence in big data analysis is a prerequisite to work with various data types and disparate data sources to establish an efficient lead generation funnel. A successful lead generation strategy requires a high level of personalization, which in turn involves the processing of massive amounts of data (often from diverse sources).

Legacy/Disparate Data Sources

According to research by Econsultancy and IBM, most companies use only a small portion of data collected for personalization, yet still struggle to unify this data.

Disparate legacy systems and data sources require the accurate analysis, cleaning, comparing, blending and filtering of data before it is ready for migration. Legacy data sources are usually related to data quality issues, and the overlapping of datasets, duplication of data and missing data are frequent occurrences. Therefore, the integration of such data requires well-established, precise steps and complex programming. Patience and scrupulousness are major keys to success when dealing with disparate data.

A key reason legacy systems tend to be a burden for both sales and marketing teams is that they appear to be outdated. Due to the exponential development of digital tools and techniques, a gap often arises between the system adopted earlier and the data gained now. Owning an outdated legacy system can result not only in sales and marketing complications, but in errors, bugs and even unprofitable decisions. Moreover, many challenges can be avoided by modernizing legacy systems, including:

• Complications with system integration and scalability.
• Security threats.
• Slow or poor performance.
• Dependence on disconnected and siloed data and tools.
• Hardware and device dependency.
• Additional costs.

In-house Data

Storing data within in-house data centers seems to be an outdated solution and cumbersome to manage. The present challenge of data management has shifted to the integration of accumulated in-house data with data gained and stored in external sources.

Combining these two categories can prove to be a huge success. Industries face the need to answer complex questions; thus, data integration is a must.

Getting A Big Impact From Big Data

Building a sustainable and profitable business largely depends on the ability to translate vast amounts of data into actionable insights. These insights are valuable for many directions of enterprise activity, especially for marketing and sales.

The need to integrate data from various sources and apply it to segment a target audience has stipulated the appearance of marketing data management systems (MDMS). Introducing such a platform allows highly personalized targeting across multiple channels. Moreover, the customer engagement road map also sees improvement through this approach. The secret to successful marketing campaigns is getting a significant impact through big data.

Despite all of the technological advancements and improvements, marketing and sales departments still struggle to align their efforts and optimize results, driving additional sales by converting more of the “right” prospects to customers. Applying a stable and well-tuned B2B prospecting platform can uncover opportunities such as:

• Customer insights application for cross-sales.
• Improvement in a personalized experience.
• Optimization of order processes.
• Better content management (taking into account a diverse range of devices and channels).
• Growth in lead nurturing.

Building Digital Lead Development Ecosystems

A digital ecosystem is centered around a company's website and is fueled by high-quality content. Building unique and highly efficient lead development ecosystems will help you leverage this channel effectively.

Digital lead development ecosystems take responsibility for both lead creation and nurturing. In other words, the ecosystem works on lead development and hands over these leads to professional salespeople, considering the demographic and behavioral data, to close the deal. The interplay between smart marketing automation tools, customer relationship management (CRM), various channels, data and a website creates a flourishing ecosystem for lead development.

Conclusion

With so many analytical tools on the market today, each with its own nuances, consolidating these functionalities into a single platform can help marketing and sales gain full advantage of the B2B lead generation and prospect development potential for accelerating business growth.

Readiness to take risks and apply new approaches and techniques can be highly rewarding. Developing the ability to combine data gained from legacy/disparate sources with in-house data can help companies refine and continually improve sales and marketing return on investment (ROI) and results.

Modernization and improvement should not be regarded as a one-time activity for those attempting to get more sales. To keep up with the market dynamics and rapidly developing technologies, companies should focus on turning their data insights into real profits. The most direct path to achieve this is efficiently utilizing the sales funnel.

In conclusion, important steps to growth include building an analytics foundation, modernizing legacy systems, applying big data in strategy development, adopting micro-market orientation and implementing a consolidated platform. These are ongoing tasks that require continual improvement in order to be prepared for the constantly changing demand.