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Whether you received a lead because someone signed up for a webinar, demo, or other offer, you need to institute a lead nurturing process to transform it into a qualified lead. What’s the best way to do this? If you want to maximize your sales conversion rates, start by picking up the phone.

Help Your Prospect Solve Their Problem

The key to lead nurturing and conversion is to focus on the prospect, their problem, and helping them to find a solution. You cannot do that without a true understanding of the issues and opportunities the person is facing. The closer you can come to interacting directly with someone, the deeper your mutual understanding will be.

While it may seem simpler to sell directly to your clients, if you want to grow more quickly, it makes sense to leverage the power of channel partners. Taking on a new partner, however, requires time and resources. And since you want to make sure you are spending your time wisely, you need to target the right partners. Finding partners that are a perfect match for your company starts with a channel-partner profile. 

What would you do if your company leadership landed you with a big hairy audacious goal of increasing leads by 2000%? Run for cover? Start putting out feelers in the job market? You’d probably think they were completely out of touch with reality. How could you possible achieve such an absurd goal? The truth is the data shows this is one goal you can achieve with well-orchestrated business-to-business telemarketing.

It just takes a step-by-step process to pre-qualify leads on the Internet, and respond to the crème de la crème quickly. How quickly? Within 5 minutes. 

Because communication is the lifeblood of any sales process, management is always seeking more efficient ways to communicate with prospects and clients. With all the possibilities for quick and easy communication methods brought forth by the digital age—social media, search engine optimization, email marketing, and more—the telephone has been sidelined by many sales and marketing departments.

And that simple fact could give you a competitive edge, but only if you decide to stand out from the crowd and add telemarketing services to your sales and marketing tactics. That’s because for all the strengths of digital marketing, it cannot replace a two-way phone conversation where people get to the root of complex business problems and find solutions together.

So where should you be using the phone to increase revenues?

Implementing a win/loss analysis program, which dissects the sales efforts your company has won or lost, requires thoughtful planning. To be successful and boost your new business win-rate, you need to get all members of your team on the same page.

Here’s a checklist of steps to launch a win/loss program:

If your telemarketing efforts are achieving sub-par results, it’s only natural to wonder whether your internal telemarketing agents, or those from your B2B teleservices company, are doing a good job.

It’s a good question.

After all, the inside sales people are on the front lines. They are the voice of your company. If they make a good first impression, your company can crack open the door, and start a relationship. If on the other hand they are unprepared for a call, and unable to hold a beneficial one-to-one conversation with your prospect or client, your company will suffer a black mark, making your job that much harder.

It’s only natural for marketers involved in business-to-business lead generation to be attracted to the lure of marketing automation. It’s easy to be mesmerized by software, such as Act-On, HubSpot, Marketo and Eloqua, that tracks how Web visitors find your website, the pages they look at, the path they take from one page to the next, where they spend the most time, and what content they download. All of this creates a myriad of data points that marketing can use to optimize the website, attract more traffic, and provide more of the content that Web visitors love.

It doesn’t stop there. The software captures leads and sends emails to Web visitors based on the content they download. And it collects all the juicy tidbits marketers love to know about the leads and clients in a database.

Relationships Not Robots

The primary aim of business-to-business lead generation is to form relationships with prospects and nurture them until they turn into business. But even the best script in the world cannot help telesales agents forge relationships.

Have you ever picked up the phone during election season and heard a robotic voice reading a recorded message in support of a particular candidate? If you’re like most people, as soon as you realize that you’re not speaking with a person, you hang up the phone.

But sometimes live human beings can have the same impersonal affect as a prerecorded message. That’s because they’re reading from a script, and, well, it sounds like they’re reading from a script. In business-to-business telemarketing, scripts have the devastating effect of turning off potential clients because your goal is to have a true peer-to-peer discussion.

The challenge of business-to-business lead generation and nurturing is often made worse by self-inflicted handicaps. One such handicap is a marketing database jam packed with incorrect, redundant, or outdated contact and company information. It wreaks havoc on sales and marketing campaigns anddooms sales representatives to poor results.

The Aging Data Challenge

Customer contact information tends to age quickly. And in the last few years, the data-aging process has accelerated. Causes for inaccurate data include:

Your sales people ask you for well-qualified leads to help in customer acquisition. They want buyers with bucks, who’re authorized to buy, need what you offer, have a sense of urgency, and can benefit from one of your solutions or products.

It sounds simple. So why does your sales funnel fail in producing qualified leads? There are several common reasons.

• Your Website Is a Lone Warrior

Your website can’t do the job alone. It’s just a cog in the sales and marketing machine. Your website may be optimized and starring on Google’s rankings. Your blog posts could be being shared frequently on LinkedIn, Twitter and across the Web.