Nikolai Bang

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.

“Data-driven” is a popular term in the business world these days and it makes sense why: data is the helping hand that decision-makers have been needing. Data helps you troubleshoot your organization, understand your performance, and make better business decisions. It can’t come as too much of a surprise then that data is also of huge benefit for salespeople! By using the right data, salespeople will know whom to contact, when to contact them, and why to contact them. Knowing these things is part of what makes data an invaluable resource for the modern salesperson.

"When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one". The rationale behind this statement is relatively easy to grasp—if you don’t personalize your messaging, people won’t feel that what you’re communicating is relevant to them and they therefore won’t be inclined to listen.

You’ve probably heard the term ‘data’ before. You’ve also probably heard that this thing called ‘data’ can help you make better and more informed decisions, as well as improving your performance. But have you ever been told what exactly business data actually is? Or what different types of business data are? Or how to implement its use? But, before we even get to that stage, have you ever been told where to find this data?

Even if your answers to any of these questions were no, then there’s no need to worry! These are all questions that this article will help you find an answer to so that you can become confident on the topic, more data-driven in your work, and see an improvement in your performance.