What if you can generate not just leads but qualified leads faster? Automatically generating qualified leads requires:
- An ideal client profile.
- A reliable database with accurate information.
- The ability to separate qualified leads from bad leads.
In this user case article, we explore how to automate generating marketing and sales leads from a single database.
Step 1: Creating Your Ideal Client Profile
In B2B industries, you sell to the target companies AND the people within the decision-making group. Therefore, marketers must 1) identify their ideal companies to sell to and 2) determine the ideal B2B leads to target.
Identify Your Ideal client companies
When picking the right companies to target, keep in mind that these companies must be the ones who will benefit greatly from your product and service. At the same time, the profits from closing sales with them must be more than the costs of targeting them.
To identify your ideal client companies, you must identify their company demographics or firmographics. Furthermore, you will also need to identify their technographics or information on the technologies they use.
Technographics and firmographics are valuable types of data that can be used by sales and marketing teams to enhance their strategies and achieve better results. Here’s an overview of each and their.
Technographics refer to data about the technology and software tools that a company uses. This
data can include information about:
- Software Stack: The specific software applications and tools a company uses for various functions such as customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, analytics, and more.
- Technology Adoption: Information about a company’s adoption of emerging technologies like AI, machine learning, cloud computing, and specific software versions.
- Integration Capabilities: Whether the company’s technology stack is compatible with other tools and systems, indicating their potential for seamless integration.
Firmographics are similar to demographics but focus on the characteristics of businesses. This data includes information such as:
- Company Size: The number of employees or annual revenue of a company.
- Industry: The industry or sector in which the company operates.
- Location: The geographic location of the company’s headquarters and branch offices.
- Ownership Type: Whether the company is publicly traded, privately owned, or a subsidiary.
- Years in Business: How long the company has been in operation.
There are many benefits for sales and marketing to use firmographics and technographics data:
- Personalization: Knowing a prospect’s technographic profile allows sales and marketing teams to personalize their messaging. For example, if a prospect already uses a specific CRM, you can tailor your pitch to highlight how your product integrates with it.
- Lead Scoring: Technographic data can be used in lead scoring models to identify high-potential leads. Companies using certain technologies may be more likely to benefit from your product or service. Sales teams can use firmographics to quickly qualify leads and prioritize them based on their fit with the ideal customer profile.
- Competitive Analysis: You can use technographics to understand which competitors your target accounts are using. This information can inform your competitive positioning and strategy. Understanding the firmographics of your competitors’ customers can help you identify opportunities for market share growth.
- Product Development: For software companies, understanding the technologies your customers use can guide product development. You can prioritize features that integrate well with popular tools.
- Targeted Advertising: In marketing campaigns, you can use technographic data to target specific segments of your audience with relevant ads.
- Market Expansion: Firmographic data can guide decisions about entering new markets or expanding within existing ones.
- Pricing Strategy: Different company sizes or industries may have different pricing sensitivities, and firmographics can inform your pricing strategy.
Segmentation questions can help you identify your preferred business demographics and attributes, including their technological preferences, IT infrastructure, and software usage.
Firmographic Questions You Need to Answer:
- Which industry is the most profitable you want to target?
- Which companies can you target locally?
- Which can afford your products or services immediately by company size?
Technographic Questions You Need to Answer:
- What digital solutions would the company use that you believe your product or service is more advantageous over?
- What digital solutions would the company use that would complement your product or service?
- Which companies are working with your competitors that you have an advantage over?
Identify Your Ideal B2B Leads
B2B leads are the decision-makers behind company purchasing. Ideal B2B leads are professionals with field expertise in your product or service. These qualified leads need less education regarding the value of what you offer. Instead, you can proceed to build rapport and nurture how your offer compares with the rest.
B2B Lead Questions You Need to Answer:
- Who influences the buying decision outcome?
- Why would this lead be likely to schedule an appointment with you?
- What are the most significant challenges in their job position?
- Based on their job, what will they find most beneficial about your product or service?
- What is the best way to contact them?
Step 2: Find a Reliable Database with Accurate Information
Many B2B contact databases are available. Here are the features you’ll need to look for to ensure you get the correct data on company and professional profiles:
- Databases that update their information in real-time,
- Global-wide and trustworthy data, and
- Easy integration with CRM tools
To continue this step, we’ll use Rhetorik’s Neuron360 as an example.
Neuron360 is a B2B datahub with over 200 million company profiles and over 60 million B2B contacts. All data are verified, compliant by design, and standardized by Rhetorik’s AI-powered model.
Neuron360-Companies offers an unrivaled level of granularity for Companies profile with more than 150+ Data fields including company name, address, website URL, phone, social handles, company and office-level firmographics, company and office-level technologies detected, yearly revenues, number of employees and much more!
The database is continuously refreshed and sourced from multiple public sites and procured datasets available from a simple web interface, robust APIs, enterprise-grade data warehouse integrations including Snowflake.
Contacts information includes 65+ Data Fields like email, job title & function, main phone number and DDIs, company name, industry associated office or business location and much more!
Step 3: Automatically Separate Qualified Leads
With your ideal client profile and chosen B2B database, you can score leads in an automated process. For example, Neuron360-Companies profile consist of their firmographics and technographics. We can use its Search tool to filter leads with your ideal client profile.
After collecting the qualified leads, you can use Neuron360 to integrate your leads into your CRM tool through your preferred programming code.
By Firmographics
| Ideal Company Profile | Search by |
|---|---|
| Which industry is the most profitable you want to target? |
|
| Which companies can you target locally? |
|
| Which can afford your products or services immediately by company size? |
|
By Technographics
| Ideal Company Profile | Search by |
|---|---|
|
What digital solutions would the company use that you believe your product or service is more advantageous over? What digital solutions would the company use that would complement your product or service? |
|
| Which companies are working with your competitors that you have an advantage over? |
|
By B2B Leads
| Ideal Company Profile | Search by |
|---|---|
|
Who influences the buying decision outcome? Why would this lead be likely to schedule an appointment with you? What are the most significant challenges in their job position? Based on their job, what will they find most beneficial about your product or service? |
|
| What is the best way to contact them? |
|
Separating Marketing and Sales Qualified Leads: What’s the Difference?
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) are leads identified by their buying journey. MQLs and SQLs are leads that fit your ideal client profile. They’re determined to be most likely to turn into a sale.
But MQLs are leads that still need to be ready to buy. Meanwhile, SQLs have expressed interest in your product or service and are prepared to buy. Marketers can identify SQLs from MQLs by contacting them via email, direct mail, or phone call. B2B leads that express interest in purchasing your offer are SQLs.
When making content for MQLs and SQLs, remember where they are in their buying journey, aka the sales funnel.
In a sales funnel, MQLs are at the top of the funnel (TOFU) and the middle of the funnel (MOFU). TOFU is the awareness stage where they are aware of the challenges (that your product or service can solve) they face and are looking for a solution. MOFU is the consideration stage where they are aware of various resolutions and are trying to determine the best for them.
SQLs are at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). BOFU is the decision stage where the right offer can nudge them to proceed with your call of action.
Neuron360: Automate Marketing and Sales Lead Generation
With your ideal client profile, you can use a B2B database to filter your qualified leads. Then, you can use the database’s CRM integration to add the leads to your list.
If you are looking for a database that also functions as a lead-generation tool, why not schedule a personalized demo with us? Neuron360 can extend your reach globally to companies needing your product or service.
Ready to see Neuron360TM in action?
Request a personalized demo today to get started!
