What is a sales lead list?
A sales lead list is a list of potential clients of a business. Leads or potential clients are understood as those who showed interest in products or services that a business is offering. These leads are ready to become the business’ clients when they understood and trusted the brand and products.
Generating sales lead lists is an essential task of a business. This task is usually handled by sales and marketing teams. The success of a company relies heavily on how effectively it’s generating high-quality leads.
What is a sales lead list for?
Sales lead lists will be introduced to teams that are responsible for generating sales directly. These teams can be sales, outreach or digital marketing teams in a company.
After the clean-up and qualification processes that are done for the lead lists, each lead will either be contacted by a sales presentative or targeted using a series of relevant content to convert them into clients.
These tasks are called outreach and lead nurturing. Businesses can use one of the two strategies or both to boost the performance of their sales generation effort.
How to generate sales lead lists?
There are several ways to generate sales leads, however, the most popular strategy is outreach done by the use of cold emailing.
Outreach strategy to generate sales lead lists
Outreach for lead gen comprises two main parts, one is prospect generation and the other is reaching out to the prospects.
1. Prospect generation
Prospect generation is the process of finding contact information and other data about the people that present the highest probability of becoming interested in what you have to offer.
There are a few ways to generate prospects effectively, those are:
- Use a combination of digital marketing tools to generate prospects
- Use a scraper to generate prospects
- Use a reliable lead database to generate prospects
The first method is quite challenging for beginners because they will need some time to learn how to use several marketing tools together to generate the data that they want. In some cases such as businesses strictly requiring certain types of contacts and data, this way doesn’t work since the tools weren’t designed specifically for lead generation.
The second method will give you control over what types of data you will collect. However, the cost of building a functional scraper is usually very expensive. If you usually adjust the way the scraper works to get different types of data, it will even be costlier.
The last method is probably the quickest and most affordable way to generate excellent prospects. A reliable lead database will allow you to get access to specific and high-quality prospects easily. They should also provide other benefits such as expert guidance and advice when you get stuck.
However, choosing a reliable lead provider isn’t as easy as you may think. There are so many bad data providers out there that are ready to take your money and waste your time and effort.
We put together some of the main things you need to look for when choosing a great data provider:
- Look for free trials
- Ask if they require credit cards for signing up, if they do, you should look for other services.
- Find out if they provide excellent support
- Find out if they provide any refund policies
- Look for generous discounts since you’re a new user
At Limeleads, the leading B2B leads database, we make sure to offer our users a risk-free experience by providing all the points above and many more. We don’t ask for credit cards to get a free trial with us. Also, our expert support is always available any day of the week.
Sign up here for an account and get your free trials with us. The whole process will only take you a couple of minutes plus no credit card is required!
2. Reaching out
The most popular ways to reach out to prospects are cold emailing or cold calling.
Cold calling has been around since the invention of telephones. It’s considered outdated by many marketers nowadays, however, there are still businesses in the world that rely on it to generate leads and sales.
Cold calling has its own pros such as greater personalization to establish relationships with prospects fast. However, it also has quite many cons, some of which are
- Cold calling can be very annoying
- Cold calling doesn’t help you reach many prospects fast compared to cold emailing
- Cold calling can be expensive when running on a large scale
Cold emailing is becoming more popular as an outreach method since it offers many advantages compared to cold calling. Some of the most noticeable pros of cold emailing are:
- Cold emailing is affordable even when running on a large scale
- Cold emailing is much less annoying
- Cold emailing can reach many prospects fast
- Cold emailing is generally not complicated for beginners to start
Cold emailing does have some cons such as:
- Beginners find email deliverability a real challenge.
- Cold emailing campaigns need constant optimization and take some time to become more effective.
If your business can afford both of the above outreach methods, it’s great, if not, we recommend focusing on cold emailing to minimize the costs.
Paid ads to generate sales lead lists
Ads that are specifically designed to generate leads such as Linkedin Lead Gen Form and Facebook Lead Generation ads can help generate leads effectively.
Linkedin gives advertisers better-targeting options such as targeting people with certain job titles, expertise and experience. Facebook on the other hand offers a wider range of audience since they have more users.
These two platforms can be great ad channels for your lead-generation campaigns. However, the cost per lead is usually very expensive.
Also, the leads that are generated by ads will need to be contacted by using either emails or calls, and there’s a chance that these leads will just ignore you. Only a percentage of leads obtained by ads will become engaging leads. Engaging leads are much more likely to become your clients.
Therefore, the real cost per lead by using ads needs to be re-calculated by your team to find out whether it’s really worth your investment or not.
We recommend running ads to generate leads, but you should start slow with a small budget to test the water.
SEO and lead magnets to generate sales lead lists
SEO refers to Search Engine Optimization, a practice that gets your site ranked highly on search engine result pages (SERPs).
The higher your site ranked for popular search terms, the more traffic your site will get. Usually, SEO traffic or organic traffic is very valuable because they are more likely to convert into clients.
However, SEO is becoming fiercely competitive for the past several years. I’ve seen many cases where businesses worked hard on SEO for years but still couldn’t rank well on search engines.
This failure can be attributed to the niche’s saturation or a lack of SEO expertise, consistency, or all of them.
Lead magnets are useful items for free download. Lead magnets can be as simple as a checklist or as complex as an eBook. When visitors download lead magnets and give out their contact information, they become leads.
Usually, the main strategy for SEO lead generation is that if the visitors don’t convert into clients, the business will try to turn them into leads by motivating them to download its lead magnets.
Similarly to other strategies mentioned above, leads will need to be contacted and nurtured by several tactics to turn them into paying clients.
Conclusion
Generating excellent sales lead lists is one of the top priorities for any business on the planet earth. It directly decides whether a business will survive and grow bigger or not.
Generating sales lead lists effectively needs a lot of time and effort to constantly optimize and test different campaigns to achieve maximum performance. This is an ever-ending process that every business will need to go through and master.
There are always some other creative ways to generate sales lead lists but they also pose a high risk for your business. Not only the risk with your investment but also the risk of being penalized by different platforms.
Therefore, while testing new campaigns or strategies, you will also need to keep a close eye on community or system warnings if you ever receive one.