Nikolai Bang

Not all businesses are the same. This simple statement isn't especially controversial, yet it's surprisingly powerful. The statement implies that, since not all businesses are the same, they should not be treated as if they are, which provides support for the practice of market segmentation. In a nutshell, market segmentation allows you to concentrate your resources on the potential customers that are the most likely to be interested in your offering. An essential component of most B2B segmentation processes is identifying the organizational characteristics that make your offering more valuable to company A than company B. One of the most powerful and most frequently used forms of organizational characteristics in B2B segmentation is industry.

The International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts that the yearly global spending on digital transformation will reach $2.8 trillion in 2025. For the uninitiated, digital transformation refers to the adoption of digital technologies by a company, and it is generally pursued in the hope that these newly-adopted digital technologies will provide efficiency gains and customer intimacy.

The aforementioned statistic clearly highlights that the demand for digital technologies that improve existing business processes is, to say the least, significant. The growing demand for digital technologies presents an unprecedented opportunity for companies that are able to provide products or services that help businesses achieve these digital transformations.

Despite being one amongst dozens of available CRM solutions, Pipedrive has managed to amass 50,000 paying customers spread across more than 140 countries. Whether that success is due to Pipedrive having almost 100 integration partners, their app being available in 14 languages, or one of the many other features that they provide is unclear, but what is clear is that Pipedrive helps salespeople close more deals.

In the case of HubSpot, the numbers speak for themselves. In 2021, less than 15 years after their founding, HubSpot announced that their CRM platform had surpassed 100,000 paying users and that they had reached more than $1 billion in annual recurring revenue. Considering HubSpot’s platform offers more than 600 integrations, a solutions partner network, and hundreds of Academy courses, the source of their success is clear: HubSpot helps companies grow better.

Since its founding in 1975, Microsoft has grown to become a household name, offering an array of software products for computing devices, including its CRM solution, Dynamics 365 CRM, that was released in 2016. With its practical functionality, flexibility, and customizability, Dynamics 365 quickly became one of the top CRM vendors in the market and has helped thousands of customers gain control of their sales process.

With more than 100,000 concurrent customers and a host of accolades to their name, Salesforce is a giant within the CRM software industry. Offering a full range of cloud-based features and functionalities, Salesforce has for more than a decade been helping its customers streamline their communicative efforts with prospects, helping them close more (and bigger) deals and grow their bottom line.

That already sounds like a pretty sweet deal. However, Salesforce is only as valuable as the data it stores. Clean and tidy data will make your processes fly, but working with unreliable and corrupt information is a miserable experience.

Obviously, knowing what something is is important. However, the practical value often comes from knowing how to do that something, not simply knowing what that something is. On the back of this very smooth introduction, we’ll be starting our discussion of the lead generation strategies that you should incorporate into your inbound marketing practices to ensure a steady flow of new leads.

While reportedly first being coined in 2006 by HubSpot, you can find examples of inbound marketing through history, even before the emergence of the internet. The common thread that linked all of these different marketing initiatives was that they worked to pull customers to the organization, not push the organization’s offering upon the customer. With the immense popularity of the inbound methodology today, the results should really speak for themselves with regards to the efficacy of an inbound approach. But, how do you implement the inbound methodology with regards to lead generation? In today’s digital world, how do you as a B2B company attract customers to your organization?

These are a few of the questions that this article will be tackling. It will be going through four essential steps that you need to follow to build an inbound lead generation engine that constantly feeds top-quality leads to your sales team. These four steps will ensure that you’re attracting relevant visitors and converting them into productive leads. But, first, let’s cover the basics.

Salespeople often obsess over growing a big, beautiful sales pipeline. “Fill pipeline with hot leads” or “fill pipeline with best-fit prospects” are recurrent tasks at the top of the to-do list. While well intentioned, that often means salespeople will dedicate too much time to sales prospecting instead of thinking about how to get prospects to flow through the pipeline.

A fun way to think about sales is as a quest. I know that might sound a little odd but, if you just bear with me, I promise the metaphor will make a lot of sense. In this fantastical metaphor, a salesperson would be the brave adventurer setting out on a perilous journey in search of fame and fortune. Now, obviously an adventurer needs many things to accomplish their quest, but there is one essential tool that is negligently underappreciated—a map. I mean, without a map, would Indiana Jones have been able to find the lost Ark? I’d venture to say that it’s doubtful.