Columnist:

Always on the lookout for new ways to identify prospects and generate leads in business markets, this year I’ve come across a handful that demonstrate welcome creativity and innovative use of digital marketing tools. Consider these. 

Ramp up your LinkedIn outreach. Hugh MacFarlane, a longtime sales and marketing trainer and coach, has added a prospecting service that uses predictive modeling to identify target prospects for a client, and then takes over the Linkedin accounts of client sales reps. The system then sends out a connection request with a note, and direct messaging that offers some thought leadership content. It later follows up, and once the connection is established and warmed up, it hands the reins back to the rep. 

Jason Kiefer offers a similar service using a templated message stream on LinkedIn on behalf of sales reps in small and medium businesses. These approaches seem to me like a worthwhile way to remove some routine lead gen tasks from the plate of your skilled salespeople, so they can spend more time in productive conversations with interested prospects. As LinkedIn uniquely combines the professional with the personal, some marketers may question the technique as being inauthentic, or crossing a line with their salespeople’s LinkedIn accounts. Me, I’d recommend a test, with the rep’s agreement.

Surround your prospects with their own colleagues. Shawn Elledge has created a nifty system he calls BuyrMail, which crafts cold prospecting emails to buyers, but includes a cc addressed to other internal influencers, who have been identified by LinkedIn research. The apparent social pressure vastly increases response rates and the number of meetings scheduled, he says. 

Outsource your top of funnel. Full-service lead gen and qualification agencies abound, but here’s a new twist. Ben Goldberg recently established Salesgig as an “outbound as a service” sales development function for SMB clients. Clients get immediate access to skilled, tech-enabled resources who can contribute to their top of funnel with speed and flexibility. And it’s cash-flow friendly, since you pay as you go, and avoid the fixed costs associated with staff and tech. 

Stock your sales development function with pre-trained SDRs. Ben Goldberg tells me he’s had success using PreHired, a company that recruits and trains sales development reps and places them in a client company as new hires, all ready to go. The upfront training is free to the rep, but after they are placed, PreHired takes a percentage of their salary for first couple of years. A win-win.

Qualify prospects up front. Union Resolute is a lead gen agency that specializes in using intent data to identify high-value prospects for clients. For themselves as a business, they deploy a remarkably simple but effective client self-qualification process they call FitAnalysis. Mark Troy, founder and CEO, says the 15-minute questionnaire helps them focus their sales resources on the 75% of inquirers who are most likely to convert to a profitable client, which cuts down on the time and expense of marketing outreach to qualify leads. 

Upgrade your chatbot. Chatbots offer enormous advantages in B2B—not only instant customer service and immediate engagement, but also a handy way to collect contact information from site visitors. Emerging new tools, such as Drift and Intercom, take the engagement potential to new levels, connecting with meta-data (e.g., IP address, CRM) to optimize the bot scripts and begin setting up a meeting with the visitor. Leadfabrice managing director Koen de Witte says, “B2B chatbots are different from consumer [bots]. They don’t have to answer any possible question. The goal is to convert the unknown into known, and then route the conversation to live chat or a nurture stream. Being super relevant during the first question is the key.” 

I’d say that any site not using these tools is leaving money on the table. 

A version of this article appeared in Biznology, the digital marketing blog. 

About the Author

Ruth P. Stevens, a past president of DMCNY and previous Silver Apple honoree, consults and speaks on B2B marketing. She also teaches marketing at NYU Stern and other business schools in the U.S. and abroad. Reach her at ruth@ruthstevens.com