Conquer customers with business development strategies

Every organization needs to solve different types of challenges in its commercial areas. For example, aligning marketing, sales, and service teams, developing new customer strategies, or generating new customers. The latter process is known as Business Development.

Lead pipeline generation is not a single process but a set of lead demand generation strategies. Many well-known companies worldwide use it within their demand generation or business development management departments.

But what to do if your company needs lead management processes, lead generation people, or a system that can perform this function?

This concept is the purpose of this article. Within this reading, we will address the following topics:

• Why develop a demand generation process in your company?

• How do you identify the differences between leads, qualified leads, MQL, or SQL?

• Experiences learned at HubSpot's Pipeline Generation Bootcamp.

• How do you conquer new customers with lead-generation strategies?

Let's start.

Why develop a demand generation process in your company?

Many organizations, regardless of their industry, can be presented with challenges concerning how many leads are generated, of those that are generated, how many go through the famous buyer's journey cycle and its respective stages:

• The awareness stage.

• The consideration stage.

• The decision stage. 

In case you need to learn all the factors involved in the buyer's journey cycle and methodology. I recommend you to read our article on:

What is Inbound Marketing?

Many companies need help prospecting and closing leads, and their sales onboarding process needs to be shorter, or maybe they have a tiny number of sales executives. Hence, owners, founders, or CEOs must constantly work on growth and sales.

These previous cases are possible reasons your company needs a defined demand generation process and a pipeline generation strategy.

How do you identify the differences between leads, qualified leads, MQL, or SQL?

Let's go back to resume the sales steps. Let's remember that the following steps govern the sales cycle of any company:

1) A prospect arrives and gets to know your company: Perhaps they have seen your store, headquarters, your company website and downloaded content, been referred by an acquaintance or client, a digital campaign, subscribed to your content, found the company at events, talks, conferences and so on. Regardless of the causes, this is the initial process. 

2) An executive, advisor, consultant, or company representative discovered that contact: The person or someone from the department in charge in your organization finds that contact, maybe through a form submission, marketing automation ads, campaigns, etc.

3) The person or representative of the company verifies the history of that contact in your CRM and gets in touch with the lead: The rep or executive verifies the interactions that the lead made and once that is made, contact the person to corroborate if there is a possible need or advisory from your company to the person.

4) It's finally a prospect: Once the contact is made and the rep or executive responds positively to an opportunity, the assessment comes. Your representative must follow up with the prospect if he needs a guide and valuable content that builds a beneficial relationship between your company and the opportunity.

5) The follow-up steps: In sales is no secret that the follow-up sequence process is vital to converting leads into qualified opportunities. This situation is only possible through follow-up steps. Schedule call spaces in your plan, have a follow-up strategy, email sequences, calls, video emails, and many more. Creativity is always a big plus.

6) Know when a BDM lead becomes a real opportunity: Many sales professionals make the mistake of "gambling with leads." Every salesperson must know that only some leads can become real opportunities. There are four known types of lifecycle stages of leads conversion, such as:

• Subscriber: Someone that is a stranger and found something curious about your company and subscribed to your newsletter, blog article page, or monthly feed.

   

• Lead: Is someone who knows you but is still in an awareness state and will not buy from you now. They need more time.
  

• Marketing Qualified Lead: Is also known as a marketing-qualified lead. It's a qualified lead who knows you and is always curious about your company's content or services but is still in a considerable state, so there's still work to be done.

• Sales Qualified Lead: This is a sales-qualified lead they are highly interested in. They have known your company for a while and also understand that they need a sales executive or rep who calls them immediately to have that first meeting.

7) Assign the opportunity at the right moment: Once the lead is highly qualified (becomes a SQL) and proves genuine interest in having a conversation, session, or meeting with a rep at your company is time to analyze "who is the right person that needs to talk with this lead."

Most big companies have to define executives, salespersons, or consultants that manage a specific region, territory, or industry. But the truth is that only some companies have the same luck. So when a Business Development executive, manager, or rep is assigning a lead, it should be to the person who has the following checklist of onboarding capabilities:

1. Has excellent communication skills.

2. Is prepared for unpredictable onboarding situations.

3. Knows the sales speech by heart and memory.

4. Has worked before with prospects in the same industry as the new lead.

5. Understands the industry and is experienced in successful business cases.

6. Knows how to be close to expectations.

7. Spoke clear ideas and knew where to lead the prospect on the next steps.

Experiences learned at HubSpot's Pipeline Generation Bootcamp.

Suppose there's still a lot of work and processes that your company needs to prepare for pipeline generation strategies and business development strategies. In that case, I recommend you and your company register for HubSpot's Bootcamps, especially the pipeline generation Bootcamp.

The pipeline generation Bootcamp powered by HubSpot is the best choice and an excellent opportunity if your business needs to build up pipeline generation and business development strategy foundations.

Storytime: Lessons learned at the pipeline generation BootCamp from HubSpot. 

Learned some of Alfonso Ramirez's CX & BDM Consultant of Imagineer experiences at HubSpot's Pipeline Generation Bootcamp. As a Consultant for Imagineer, a well-known solutions partner from HubSpot in the United States and LATAM. I came across it a few weeks ago when I received a mail from partners that HubSpot was allowing many partners worldwide to participate in a 6-week immersed training session of one of their Bootcamps.

As a Customer experience and business development consultant, he believes it's an excellent experience for everyone looking forward to new learning and professional development experiences. The HubSpot Pipeline Generation is highly educational, dynamic, and inspirational for every sales professional starting to become familiar with HubSpot.

Some instructors in this Bootcamp were Trygve Olsen, Debbie Akintonde, and Keith Gutierrez, known HubSpot certified trainers. There was also the participation of a renowned HubSpot Sales Director, Dan Tyre. Who is also known to be part of establishing HubSpot's Solutions Partner Program?

The main goals of HubSpot's Pipeline Generation Bootcamp were:

• The change of mindset from the traditional and aggressive sales process to consultative selling using the Inbound Sales methodology. Helping prospects, understanding their need, and focusing on building valuable relationships.

• Differentiating which prospects are a great fit for your company.
  

• Creative ways of onboarding qualified leads and knowing the right moments, how to build a follow-up strategy, and being valuable and an active listener to your prospects.
  

• Building strategies to prepare for prospect's objections.

• Using different contact ideas like voicemails and video emails.

• Practicing Roleplays of real sales situations.

The Bootcamp lasts six weeks of diligent work, preparing you for the future. Like other Bootcamps, the PGB also includes weekly sessions with the instructors and shares recordings of each session. Workbooks to stay on track with work and tasks to complete to graduate, multiple presentations, insightful content and sales, active listening techniques, and many more to improve your sales onboarding processes and develop better communication skills.

If this interests you, there's still time to register for the Q4 HubSpot Bootcamps.

How do you conquer new customers with pipeline generation strategies?

There are five great ways to conquer new customers through pipeline generation strategies which are:

1) Defining the sales process at your company: every organization has different methods, processes, and sales cycles. The only way to conquer the conversion sales cycle is to build a well-defined sales process for your organization. 

I highly recommend articles on: 

• Six key steps to define your business processes.

• How to qualify my opportunities from my sales CRM.

• Lead or qualified lead? Generation of effective sales.

2) Build up a consistent, compelling campaign strategy. 

3) Established a relationship with the prospects by sharing meaningful content, being helpful being an honest advisor to your contact's needs.

 4) Align Sales and Marketing through the business development process, making the right content for your prospects and providing it with the right message to certify that the leads always have a valuable experience with your company.

5) Build up consistent reporting on your CRM or business process management system so that you can analyze all the different metrics regarding your lead generation and conversion strategies.

At Imagineer, we take care of understanding the moments to create high-value experiences. If this article interests you and you want to take your company to excellence with pipeline generation, business development strategies, and customer experience management practices, schedule a consulting session with one of our consultants.