How Do You Generate Leads Consistently – RevBoss

Having a full pipeline is crucial to generating repeat leads. And so is automation. 

However, volume and repetition are only half the battle. Someone could consistently generate the wrong leads, which isn’t exactly the goal. The goal should be to create the right leads more often and with less work. 

Today, we’ll discuss how to create a faster lead-gen process while maintaining the quality of your leads. Let’s get started. 

Key Takeaways

• A full pipeline is great, but ensure it’s filled with high-potential leads, not just any leads. Aim to generate the right leads more often and with less effort.
• Use clear criteria to determine if leads are worth pursuing. MQLs, SALs, and SQLs help streamline this process, so your team spends time on leads more likely to convert.
• Your sales and marketing teams should be on the same page to avoid mismatches between lead data and follow-up efforts. 
• Automate routine tasks like data entry and lead scoring to free up your sales team for high-impact activities. Tools like RevBoss can bridge gaps between lead collection and human follow-up, making lead generation more efficient.

Consistent Lead Generation Keeps Everything Ticking Along

The more high-quality leads steadily drip into your team’s pipeline, the less time you need to spend on unfruitful, energy-depleting efforts. You’ll have more leads coming in – meaning you don’t have to hold on to “maybes” for dear life and encourage a “no” where warranted. 

Additionally, if those consistent leads are truly high-potential, they’ll be easier to sell to. With repeatable processes and skills in place, your team can confidently close more deals.

However, the dual burden of prospecting and selling can dilute their focus and effectiveness in each area. That’s why some organizations have separate roles and dedicated lead generation teams like SDRs (or SDR-as-a-Service if hiring and training an SDR isn’t an option). That’s also why the close alignment of sales and marketing teams is crucial. 

How to Generate (Better) Leads Consistently

Qualify Your Leads 

Qualifying leads is arguably the quickest way to determine whether a lead will likely become a customer. By assessing factors like budget, decision-making authority, and buyer intent, reps can focus their efforts on leads with a higher chance of converting. 

This allows them to prioritize and invest in the most promising opportunities rather than chasing every lead that comes their way. Here’s what the typical qualification process looks like:

• MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): The marketing team initially qualifies a lead based on interest and engagement with marketing efforts, such as downloading content or attending webinars.
• SAL (Sales Accepted Lead): Next, the marketing team hands off MQLs to sales, who assess whether these leads fit the criteria for further pursuit, such as their BANT (budget, authority, needs, and timing). If those leads pass the test, they become SALs.
• SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): SQLs are Leads who have been further evaluated and meet the criteria for serious sales conversations, indicating they’re likely ready to make a purchasing decision. For example, if they’ve shown high engagement with content, a clear problem the product can solve, and decision-making authority who is ready to buy within a set timeframe, they can be considered an SQL.

Align Sales and Marketing

Of course, the criteria for MQLs, SALs, or SQLs can vary widely between companies. 

For example, companies might define an MQL as a lead who downloaded a whitepaper and attended a webinar. In contrast, they might define an SQL as a SAL that has scheduled a demo and fits the budget and timeline criteria. 

Regardless of the defined criteria, the most important thing is ensuring alignment between sales and marketing for a unified approach and seamless handoffs. Otherwise, it is easy to blur the line between a good fit and a bad-fit prospect. 

When the handoff happens, it’s on sales to make the right moves. This leads us to…

Generate Clear, Repeatable Sales Processes

A great way to build a sales pipeline is to define repeatable sales processes that are easy to execute. 

Let’s say your sales team follows a repeatable strategy of using a specific email template and call script for all initial outreach. Not just any email template, but the winning variation from an A/B test you’ve conducted. 

Based on tried-and-true methods, your team uses a successful strategy instead of each salesperson trying different, untested approaches.

That doesn’t mean they should follow a mold and act robotically, as we discussed in our Repeatable Sales Processes article. Even with a rock-solid process in place, there’s plenty of room for personalization.

In addition, repeatable very often equals predictable. When you follow proven methods for lead generation, you can more accurately forecast outcomes and plan for growth.

Identify Time-Wasters and Needle-Movers

Spend more time on what moves the needle, and do your best to cut down on (if not eliminate) the time-wasters.

For example, suppose sales reps spend 10 hours weekly on manual data entry, but this task minimizes conversions. In that case, it indicates a non-performing task that can be automated or minimized.

Conversely, if reps spend 5 hours weekly on personalized follow-up calls and consistently lead to high conversion rates, this is a high-impact activity worth prioritizing. Especially since 59% of consumers say personalized engagement based on past interactions is crucial to winning their business. 

Another example: “Maybe” is a massive time-waster for sales teams. 

Automate the Humdrum (With a Caveat)

You’ve probably encountered this figure: sales reps spend 66% of their time on non-selling activities. As a result, the pipeline can dry up, leading to inconsistent revenue and missed opportunities. 

In short, as long as you have the right data…automate what can be automated and templatize what can be templatized. Which of the following processes have you automated?

Automate Your Marketing

When lead generation and marketing automation work together, every component of your marketing and sales process can be streamlined and scaled, reducing many of the roadblocks to success. For example, it allows you to pinpoint exactly where a lead went cold or heated up, and over time, you can leverage this data to identify larger trends and optimize your processes even more.

Here are just a few things you can speed up:

• Social Media Posting
• Lead Scoring
• Content Distribution
• Ad Campaign Management
• Customer Segmentation
• Analytics and Reporting
• Chatbots
• CRM Updates

Once again, effective automation requires proper sales and marketing alignment, so don’t take it lightly! 

Marketing might generate leads that sales aren’t aware of, or sales might not have the full context of leads’ interactions with marketing content. When set up intentionally, automation bridges these gaps by tracking and managing leads throughout their journey, providing real-time data and insights to both teams.

Automate Prospecting

You can be an exceptional salesperson while being ineffective at prospecting. Read that again.

When thinking of automated prospecting, it’s easy to imagine fancy tools and software that gather information on potential leads without human intervention. While such tools can collect valuable data, there can be a disconnect between automated data collection and human follow-up. This usually happens if this data isn’t seamlessly integrated into the sales process. 

Even though it all boils down to a tightly-knit workflow, resource constraints, and integration complexities can present barriers. Alternatively, tools like RevBoss provide end-to-end lead management solutions for cohesive integration between lead collection and sales follow-up. So that your team’s inbox, CRM, or calendar is brimming with active, qualified prospects, and your sales team can do their best work unhindered.

Generating and Closing High-Potential Leads at Scale

With a dependable pool of high-quality leads, sales teams can focus on nurturing relationships and closing deals, leading to predictable and repeatable sales outcomes. In other words: they can confidently move on from “no’s” and immediately seek the next high-potential lead around the corner.

That said, the number of closed deals will largely depend on your team’s ability to pinpoint high-potential leads and the efficiency of your marketing teams and SDRs in generating and nurturing those leads.

The good news is that with the right training and opportunities, most teams can significantly improve their skills and performance, especially when given more breathing room to focus on what they excel at.

However, for those worried about the upfront costs and time investment involved in training your sales team, outsourcing to a specialized provider can save you money and increase ramp-up times, making it a potentially more cost-effective choice of training in-house staff.

We built RevBoss to automate the tedious process of generating sales leads with an outbound sales engine. Our goal is to deliver on-demand sales results, combining software efficiency with an expert human-assisted touch. We’d love to help out if we can!