How to Create B2B Lead Generation Funnel

Lead generation for B2B sales is a little bit on the tougher side, let's accept it.

All we need is a perfect strategy to acquire our desired leads to gain our business interest. Remember one thing: there are many decision-makers involved in B2B sales, unlike B2C.

Apart from that, we have to distinguish the B2B sales funnel from the B2C sales funnel in order to generate specific leads.

A lead funnel is a structured process that pushes leads (i.e., potential customers) through various stages, from making them aware of the products to becoming paying customers. Basically, this funnel is a systematic approach to attract, nurture, and convert prospects through marketing means.

Leads' behavior and interest depend on various matters. And driving their interests, you need to understand how your customers are behaving when they visit your platform. Once you track their behavior, it could be easy for you to provide them with what they want. Recent data shared by McKinsey revealed that companies that have understood their customers' behavior enjoyed more than 85% growth in their sales.

Let's check what their processes include;

Compared to B2C, the decision-maker is a single person. Naturally, the way to stage the sales funnel for B2B will be different here. Let's talk about it.

Selling products or services in the B2B domain is complex and tricky.

• For 1 deal, there will be 4 to 6 target persons from one organization

• Longer sales cycle and sometimes stretched conversions. A lot of decision-making processes lie in between.

• A high level of scrutiny is involved in the proposal

• Purchase decisions in every case of B2B are driven by rational thoughts.

• Personalized and nurturing communication is encouraged throughout the funnel.

• Prospects want to see new insights apart from basic information that already exists in the market

• Lengthy sales cycle, competitors' assessment, and multiple touchpoints are involved in this funnel.

Compared to B2B, the B2C sales funnel is comparatively much simpler. Let's check what it covers.

Every sales funnel has three primary stages – TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU. Each stage of the funnel serves a different purpose and consists of different types of marketing operations. In B2B lead generation, each stage of the funnel creates opportunities and nurtures leads. Let's have a close look at each stage of the B2B lead funnel here

This is the first stage of our B2B leads, and it's all about creating awareness and getting the attention of your leads. This is the area where you start getting traffic to your sites. At this stage, the average time to show the results will take time. You only need to focus on creating awareness.

To create awareness of your products, start with understanding your audience, check what they exactly need. If you can understand their needs, then you can deliver what they want. For this, you need to prepare ideal customer profiles to detail your customers' needs. Highlight what your customers demand, their pain points, aspirations, etc. Once you get to know them, you can tailor your marketing activities according.

Examine the lead scoring to qualify your leads. Certain industries work with certain types of data and have their specific criteria. By following all data processing steps, you can lead score and organize your B2B lead data. Based on job titles, locations, industry types, etc, are considered here to get insights from data.

Customer journey is a blueprint for marketing, and it is being prepared at this stage only. It basically builds the foundation and guides each stage of marketing in its own way.

You have created enough awareness of your products at the TOFU level. And you probably get some leads during that procedure. Now you need to nurture your leads a bit. Let's detail everything about this for this level.

First and foremost, educate your audience about your products. This is the best way to keep your leads engaged in your work. You can integrate content marketing strategies at this stage to educate your leads.

Sending a personalized email is a way better than running a salesy ad. Niche down your targeted leads and send them personalized emails. Tell them how your products can help them solve their problems. The change would get higher if you work with highly graded processed information.

In B2B, it's often seen that sales cycles are getting stretched from weeks to months. It's because multiple stakeholders are involved in the funnel. Hence, you have to strategize your sales and promotional tactics to stay included in the sales cycles from the beginning till the end. Retargeting and remarketing as a practice should be in your process as a regular thing.

At this stage, your leads are ready to take action. You just need to convince them with your work. Hence, you have to be ready with your projects to showcase your brand and how it can help them and others. The following types of content you need to enable at this bottom level;

🗸 Testimonial (to show how your brand has helped others)
🗸 Case reports (to show the approach your brand has solved issues)
🗸 E-books and service pages (to showcase your subject matter expertise)

Getting the maximum benefits from the sales funnels is the ultimate goal of any marketing company. But for that, you need proper data related to your customers. On one side, you need data to gain what customers like, and on the other hand, you need data to check how your marketing performance is going.

Investing in a proper data processing system is the ultimate way to optimize your B2B lead generation funnel here.