When you’re ready to grow your asphalt business and gain market share, you want to start by generating the highest number of quality leads that you can. And it makes sense—the more leads you get, the better chance you have at increasing sales and revenue.
Quality leads are what drives your business’s growth, and you need them not only to survive but to thrive. The problem, however, is that fruitful leads are often difficult to come by, particularly in saturated industries like paving, asphalting, and construction. This is because there are only a fixed number of growth opportunities in your market, yet businesses often rely on disjointed lead generation strategies in an attempt to drive new business and expand their reach.
A fragmented approach to lead generation ultimately leads to missed opportunities and leads that weren’t a good fit for your business from the beginning. What you need are concrete strategies to generate leads that will lead to increased sales and pave the way to growth.
In this post, we look at seven strategies your commercial paving business can use to generate high-quality leads.
1. Do Your Research
The critical—and often overlooked—first step in B2B appointment setting is to determine who your target audience is. Not only does this help you to look for high-quality leads, but this step also enables you to unify other parts of your lead generation strategy.
By knowing your target audience, you achieve the following:
- You can personalize your messaging. Knowing your target audience means that you can tailor messaging that’s relevant and valuable to them. In other words, you’ll build a resource that they can use when they have questions or need guidance. Logically, if you provide worthwhile information with your marketing materials, your audience will contact you when they need paving services.
- You can personalize your content. Like messaging, you’ll be able to personalize your content. You’ll be in a better position to employ the right language, the right images, and the right information in your content to create powerful marketing around your service or product.
- You know your value proposition. By knowing who your customer is, you’ll uncover what their problems are that they’re trying to solve and how your services can solve these problems. In simple terms, you’ll know what value you have to offer, and you’ll be able to speak in terms that resonate with your target audience.
The more time you spend to research and determine who your target audience is, the more effective your marketing and your sales processes become. By starting with a deep understanding of your audience, prospecting is easier, and other marketing strategies like cold calling or email marketing have a more noticeable impact on your bottom line.
2. Focus Your Cold-Calling Efforts
No, cold calling is not dead. If you’re under the impression that it is and you don’t have a B2B appointment setting strategy, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities. By the time you’ve determined who your target audience is, you’ll also probably have a list of opportunities you can target to gain market share. If you don’t, you’ll struggle to build a successful sales pipeline.
The key with cold calling, though, is that it takes the right team. You should have a group of sales development representatives who focus on setting appointments by calling the targets on your list to gauge interest and another group of salespeople that focuses on closing the deal.
3. Have a Website
Your website is a salesman who never sleeps. As part of determining who your target audience is, what they want, and what problems they have, you should also have an idea of what they’re searching for online.
With this in mind, you should have a website with content that presents solutions to your audience’s problems. You can use SEO services to ensure your website appears before competitors on search engines. SEO is one of the most powerful forms of inbound marketing that you have in your arsenal, and with the right strategy, leads come to you instead of you having to go out and find them.
The secret to using your website as an effective tool is to avoid selling on your website and focus it around helping. In other words, you should provide relevant and valuable content catered specifically to sharing insights and answers relevant to your target audience.
4. Use an Email Marketing Platform
Email marketing is a crucial component of your B2B lead generation strategy. It helps you to communicate with prospects and guide them through your sales funnel.
The problem, however, is that, although email marketing is extremely powerful, it does take a lot of work and can become resource-intensive. Considering this, it may be worth your while to invest in an email automation platform that you can use to make sure the right people get the right messages. This helps build stronger relationships with your audience, and when the time comes to buy, you’re on top of their list.
In addition, because it saves salespeople time in that they don’t have to manage their email communications, they have more of it to spend on what they do best—closing more deals.
5. Nurture Those Leads
By using cold calling, your website, and email marketing, you have several channels for leads to come through. Remember, though, that many of those leads won’t be ready to buy yet. It’s vital that you nurture those leads to make sure that when they’re ready, you can move them to the next stage of your sales funnel. Think, for example, of a customer who loses their long-standing paving contractor. If you’ve properly nurtured the lead, they’ll look to you as the obvious replacement.
Because of this, a lead nurturing program is an essential part of your B2B appointment setting strategy. Your lead nurturing strategy relies on consistent communication with potential customers and providing them with relevant information. For this, you can use an email marketing platform to communicate with them and even a CRM to manage, nurture, and move those leads through your sales funnel when the time is right.
6. Streamline Your Appointment Setting Process
You won’t be able to sustain any of the above initiatives if you don’t develop and follow a consistent and efficient process for B2B appointment setting. The process should uncover who your customers are, how you go about contacting prospects, and how you move them through your sales funnel at the right time.
To achieve this, you have to consider:
- Where and how your appointment setters get access to prospect data and what tools they can use to accomplish this.
- What the steps are in the appointment setting process.
- How appointments setters go about the data cleansing process. In other words, how they determine who the key decision maker (KDM) is and what factors qualify a lead as worthwhile.
- Where sales development representatives store information about the leads in your sales pipeline and what tools they use to do this.
- What your messaging should sound like for different KDMs.
- How your appointment setters nurture leads and what personalized, valuable, and relevant information should be used for this purpose.
If you don’t nail down this process, your B2B lead generation efforts and B2B sales won’t align with your growth goals, and you’ll have a hard time sustaining any measure of success.
7. Outsource Your Lead Generation
By outsourcing your B2B appointment setting to experts in lead generation, you save you time, and you can focus on delivering a product or service to your current customers instead of worrying about if new customers are coming in.
Lead generation experts follow a strategic process and employ the above sales techniques to gather leads and set appointments, which helps you close more deals. That means you never miss an opportunity to increase your revenue and grow your business when there’s an opportunity to gain market share.
Ultimately, outsourcing lead generation also saves you money because you gain access to a team of experts (who do all the above and more all day every day) for less than what it would take to hire one full-time salesperson, so your return on investment is drastically improved.
What’s Next?
By now, you should have a clear idea of strategies you can implement to immediately improve your lead generation efforts. With these tips, you can expect to source higher quality leads and, ultimately, close more deals. If you think you need some help implementing or outsourcing any of the above strategies, get in touch with the experts at Abstrakt Marketing Group today.
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