What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the process of attracting and engaging prospective buyers. The goal is to collect their contact information and build a pipeline that allows you to nurture their interest, before finally handing them over to sales - where they will ideally be converted into opportunities and, eventually, customers.
This is important because B2B sales cycles are long and complex. Buyer journeys are increasingly non-linear, and over 40% of deals take 4-9 months to complete - while nearly one-third last over a year.
Consistent lead generation ensures your company grows at a steady, sustainable rate. Without a strong pipeline of new leads, you will reach the end of one sales cycle - and suddenly have to wait up to 9 months before new leads are ready to complete a deal.
Why is Lead Generation Important for SaaS Businesses?
There are several factors that make lead generation particularly important for B2B SaaS businesses, including:
- Battling attrition: SaaS products are often easier to ditch than other products or services. One report found an average churn rate of 13%. A steady stream of new leads ensures your user base doesn’t shrink and old users are seamlessly replaced.
- Growing competition: B2B SaaS is a hypergrowth sector with new players constantly introducing new features, such as generative AI tools, that challenge the existing order. Lead generation is therefore not just about attracting prospects new to the category, but stealing users from your competitors – before they do the same to you.
- Long-term dominance: Even when a B2B SaaS company gains a large market share within their niche, lead generation is essential to maintain that edge and ensure they remain dominant.
How does SaaS Lead Generation Differ from Other Industries?
Most B2B industries have built-in demand: companies will always need lawyers and accountants, and the challenge is therefore to differentiate your services. SaaS brands must also differentiate themselves from competitors, of course, but they have the added task of convincing buyers their offering is actually necessary in the first place.
Most B2B SaaS products are replacing older processes – which many buyers may be used to and see no issue with – or are creating a new benefit which buyers need to understand. For example: imagine trying to convince an educational institution that a video streaming platform is necessary for students to learn effectively, when they have been happily relying on actual teachers since the beginning of history.
The takeaway? B2B SaaS companies have a much harder time generating interest. They must demonstrate that their products’ usability, integration capabilities and pricing align with the prospect’s needs – and that’s after convincing them that their solution can actually provide worthwhile benefit.
Lead Generation vs. Demand Generation: What’s the Difference?
While lead generation focuses on capturing customer information, demand generation is all about building brand awareness. While research from Gartner shows that B2B brands generally invest in both equally, it is useful to understand how each can be leveraged at different points in your business’s evolution.
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Lead generation has a more immediate impact on your bottom-line results, whereas demand generation is a long-term investment. As a result, early-stage businesses are often best served by lead generation as it will help them grow faster, and medium-sized businesses may choose to invest a growing proportion of their budget in demand generation to help solidify their position in the market.
However, smart marketers understand that these two activities are not always completely distinct. Many lead generation tactics can also help build brand awareness and generate organic demand, while demand generation increases the likelihood a prospect will become a lead.
3 Demand Generation Strategies that Also Attract Leads
The best way to understand the cross-over between lead and demand generation is to look at a few specific examples. Here are three methods that both build your brand and generate quality leads:
- Thought Leadership
B2B SaaS businesses can generate significant interest from buyers by presenting original insights and ideas. Consider Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubSpot who has amassed over 1 million followers on LinkedIn and consistently drives new leads and increases brand awareness of the business through his posts.
Thought leadership is not channel-specific: it can be done through webinars, email newsletters or blog posts – and you can repurpose any single piece of content across multiple mediums. This makes it a highly efficient lead generation strategy.
- Category Creation
Many of today’s most successful SaaS brands generated their initial buzz by introducing an entirely new category of solution to the market. For example: HubSpot founder Brian Halligan is often credited as inventing the term “inbound marketing”, which has since become one of the industry’s most important terms.
For many marketers (one of HubSpot’s core audiences), this new term signaled opportunity. The company likely gained many people interested in learning more or testing its product by building awareness of this new concept.
- Original Research
B2B buyers always want new statistics and research to back up their business cases and understand their needs. Many SaaS brands leverage this desire to build authority – and generate quality leads.
A perfect example is Salesforce, whose annual research reports are seen by the entire sales community as a gold standard. But by gating the content, they also drive countless professionals to share their contact details in return for a downloadable version of the report.
What Does Lead Generation Involve?
Most B2B businesses use a variety of marketing methods to generate leads. These include:
Content Marketing
B2B buyers research solutions through a range of online content, and the volume of content they consume has grown over 18% in the last year alone. Content marketing - from blogs and infographics to eBooks and whitepapers - can generate leads by capturing buyers’ attention during that research phase and encouraging them to either a) submit their contact information to access gated content or b) contact sales through a CTA at the end of a piece of content.
SEO
90% of B2B buyers use search engines to research their purchases. Appearing on the first page of relevant searches, therefore, positions your business to generate attention and ultimately capture a buyer’s information through either gated content or a direct inquiry from the buyer.
Paid Media
From Google Ads to LinkedIn Ads, paid media enables B2B businesses to capture buyers’ attention immediately, rather than investing in a long-term SEO strategy or creating extensive content for your audience. By presenting an enticing offer in your ads, such as original research or a free trial, you can capture buyers’ contact information through paid media.
Webinars
73% of B2B marketers consider webinars the most effective way of generating high-quality leads. With the right webinar promotion strategy and an enticing topic, you can convince buyers not only to give you their contact details but actually spend their time engaging directly with your team - which builds trust and allows you to showcase your expertise.
Cold Email Campaigns
Cold emails are a highly cost-effective way of generating leads. By researching buyers you believe might benefit from your product and sending attention-grabbing emails, you can persuade them to engage with your business without the cost of advertising or content generation.
3 Steps to Create Powerful Content
1. Undertake Exhaustive Research
The impact of your content is contingent on the level of expertise you capture. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are therefore an invaluable source of insights and information about both the product and the way it’s used within organizations.
Content writers should have the opportunity to interview these SMEs, as well as accessing product demos and any sales collateral you might have. All of this will provide comprehensive context and ensure the content is effortlessly authoritative – which is the best way to ensure it “lands” with SaaS buyers.
2. Segment Your Content
SaaS buyers will only read content that is directly relevant to their needs. They are likely too time-poor and have multiple vendors to choose from, which means your content needs to speak to very specific pain points- which is why we recommend SaaS brands generate content for individual segments of their audience.
Your buyer team might include CFOs, COOs, CMOs, and CEOs – but they will each have different needs and concerns. Produce content for each so that it only includes the information they care about – and positions your solution as ideal for their goals.
3. Repurpose Content
The research and content writing process required to produce high-quality B2B SaaS content can be long and expensive. Brands should therefore look to ensure every piece they produce is squeezed for all it’s worth – and by that we mean repurposing content across multiple platforms.
A single blog could produce multiple social posts; a single eBook could produce multiple blogs; a single infographic could provide the statistics and insights to drive content generation for a month or more. Take a strategic approach to content generation to ensure you get the highest possible ROI.
3 Key Factors to Manage a Lead Generation Campaign
1. Daily management
The key to cost-effective and successful lead generation is responsiveness: you need to constantly monitor and adjust ad bids; make sure your content is being pushed on the right platforms; any social media engagement is responded to immediately; and your website, landing pages and demo platform are all functioning flawlessly.
2. Marketing Automation
Another key aspect of effective SaaS lead generation is personalization: you need to deliver the right message to the right prospect at the right moment. This is not plausible for individual marketers to achieve at scale, which is why so many brands utilize systems like HubSpot to automate marketing emails, sales outreach and responses and lead scoring.
3. Tracking and Optimization
Lead generation strategies evolve over time. Not only do you gain a better understanding of what your prospects respond to – the prospects’ own priorities and needs change. As a result, tracking, analyzing and optimizing your campaigns is essential to deliver consistent improvements to your pipeline.
Of course, all this is a big lift for most SaaS brands that have other things to focus other besides generating leads – and that’s why so many bring in external support...
5 Key Factors to Consider
1. Experience and Expertise in Lead Generation
The chief reason to partner with a B2B lead generation agency is to access expertise. But agencies differ greatly in both the level of experience they offer and their domain-specific expertise. For example: many B2B content agencies specialize in lead generation, but they will only provide true expertise in content writing and distribution.
The key therefore is to look for agencies that have experts across all the areas you need, from content and paid media to strategy and RevOps.
2. Knowledge of Your Market
Effective lead generation is always carefully tailored to your specific market and buyers. An agency might have extensive experience with SaaS lead generation, but never have worked with a business like yours.
This doesn’t have to be a deal-breaker: plenty of agencies are capable of adapting quickly and learning about your domain. But you should consider the level of extra work that will be required working with a less experienced or knowledgeable agency, or one that doesn’t know a real understanding of the SaaS marketplace.
3. Proven Track Record
Plenty of B2B SaaS marketing agencies will advertise their lead generation services, but can they actually back their claims up with strong case studies? It’s easy to assume all marketing skills are transferable, but if you are looking for lead generation specialists, you want one that has a proven track record of successful lead generation campaigns.
4. Tech Knowledge
SaaS buyers will rely on your marketing to guide them through the technical aspects of your product. This covers factors such as compliance, integration and usability – all of which require an understanding of technology and how users think about technology. Can your agency deliver on this aspect of the assignment?
5. Value and ROI
The ultimate decision-making heuristic when hiring a third-party vendor should always be: will this provide a strong ROI? When looking at B2B lead generation agencies, the question can be broken down into two factors: how much will they improve our pipeline? And how much will we save by hiring them?
3 Common Challenges Lead Generation Agencies Present
1. Lack of alignment
Partnering with a lead generation requires a shared set of values and goals. But many businesses find their agency is focused on its own needs, suggesting services that serve its own bottom line rather than producing optimal results.
At ProperExpression, we avoid this problem by starting every engagement with extensive meetings where we align our values, goals and incentives. This helps us create a close relationship, understand your business’s culture and develop a way of working that benefits both parties.
2. Lack of transparency and accountability
Many marketing agencies are either unable or unwilling to share clear data about their performance. This makes it impossible to accurately assess the value they offer and hold them accountable for the impact of their work.
ProperExpression bucks this trend by providing detailed reporting across every marketing activity. We set regular meetings to address your concerns, present our latest performance metrics and discuss how your lead generation strategy is evolving.
3. Lack of capacity
Some lead generation agencies deliver strong results - but cannot scale alongside your business. They lack internal resources, and don’t have experience expanding their strategies to address the changing needs of a growing brand.
The operating model ProperExpression uses ensures this is never a concern. By utilizing robust in-house experts and third-party contractors, we can adjust our teams to match your changing needs.
4 Questions to Ask a B2B Lead Generation Agency
1. “What are your company’s values?”
While aligning your values is important, you should also expect a strong agency to have its own strong sense of identity. This ensures the agency isn’t just saying what you want to hear - it actually operates based on the right principles.
2. “Can you provide case studies to back up your claims?”
Many agencies advertise case studies that are vague and lack concrete performance metrics. You should expect a B2B SaaS lead generation agency to provide detailed case studies that explain exactly how they helped previous clients - and the results they produced.
3. “How much client involvement do you require?"
Agencies often demand a lot of effort from clients, but this can sap your resources. However, you also don’t want to feel shutout of the process, or left in the dark. Look for agencies that are flexible and open to collaboration without needing your input on every piece of work.
4. “How do you keep clients in the loop?”
Reliable agencies take accountability and present quantifiable performance data. But this shouldn’t be something you have to push for: they should have a pre-existing process that you can fit into.
Plan and Implement the Ultimate Lead Generation Strategy with ProperExpression
At ProperExpression, we believe reliable lead generation is too important to leave to chance. That’s why we have built our agency around three key pillars of transparency, accountability and ROI.
Everything we do is designed to maximize our clients’ revenue, and we have a whole library of case studies that showcase how our approach works. But if you’re wondering how we work with clients to generate, nurture and convert more leads, contact us today.
