One of the most challenging and most commonly misunderstood components of successful business-to-business marketing is lead generation and nurturing (or ‘demand generation and management’).

Starting with how you generate inquiries through the challenging hand-off and follow-up by your sales force, and most importantly how you measure the results, this ”discipline” sees more wasted money, more missed opportunities, and more downright mistakes than any other area in business-to-business (B2B) marketing and sales.

Now that some of the more traditional direct mail disciplines (multivariate testing, A/B splits) are being used on the Internet (web design, email marketing, search engine marketing, pay-per-click advertising, landing page optimization, social media, web 2.0), it has made the the demand generation and management process more complex and more difficult than ever. 

Why Lead Generation is so important

But this really presents businesses the greatest opportunity for three reasons:

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Customer Winbacks

Emphatically “Yes”!

There are lots of reasons, other than the economy, why you are losing customers.

Customers could’ve been frustrated by delays, or aggravated by one bad experience. They could be annoyed by lack of response from you, or seduced away by your competition.

The point is: “If you are losing customers—do you know why?”

There’s a big difference between customers who are gone and customers you can win back. Unfortunately, most sales managers and salespeople don’t make that distinction.

And many executives neglect to direct their managers to ferret out the reasons why customers are defecting. Why? In the rush to get new business—we ignore lost business—even though in many cases the closing ratio for winning back lost customers can be much higher than the ratio for new business. And the reasons for customer defection are vitally important.

A customer win-back program is valuable for three main reasons (1) you win back “lost” revenue (2) you can uncover potential weaknesses in your organization, and (3) you can discover potential threats from the competition.

4 Steps to Winback Success

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You make your own luck… ~ Ernest Hemingway

Business to Business lead generation is a straightforward process, but since it depends on both the sales and marketing departments working together as a team to be successful, it needs a high degree of cooperation from everyone involved.

It is not something that just happens. It requires diligence, teamwork, and yes–a little luck, the kind of luck that you achieve through hard work and persistence.

7 Steps to B2B Lead Generation Success

Here are the top 7 things the sales & marketing teams must do to improve your odds of success:

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Referrals = Stimulus

I am funding a Small Business Stimulus package of my own.

If you refer someone to me, and they engage me for a project, I will write you a check for 10% of the engagement fee (the average fee is $2,250 which means approximately $225 in your pocket). 

If you happen to know anyone who could benefit from this, please forward it to them, or fill out the form below.

Anyone you refer me to, and who engages me, I will take 10% of the engagement and write you a check.  If you decide to donate the money to Donors Choose, I’ll match it. Making it 20%. And I’ll make the contribution in your name.

For example, I offer a comprehensive website design/search engine marketing package for small business that’s $4,500. Typically I split this into two payments $2,250 upon engagement, and $2,250 upon launching the website.

That means either I’ll write you a check for $225, or I’ll donate $450 in your name to Donor’s Choose, and you get to decide where it goes.

Everybody wins. Thank you!