Whether a business is selling a product or a solution, the primary objective is always to generate quality leads which can be converted into sales or at least, genuine business inquiries. While digital marketing channels and E-commerce platforms have made it easier to sell an end consumer facing product (with, generally, smaller average product price), B2B lead generation requires a lot more heavy-lifting (read, strategic planning) which makes it inevitable to deploy multiple B2B lead generation techniques which are closely knitted with each other. Any technique deployed on a standalone basis, be it social media campaigns, E-mail campaigns, content syndication or even webinars and podcasts, may not give desired results for B2B companies.
Therefore, for any B2B lead generation campaign, investment in lead ‘qualification’ (time and dollars, both) becomes as important as investing in lead ‘generation’. Among various ways available for lead qualification, including drip marketing campaigns, automated Email sequencing campaigns, and lead nurturing campaigns, tele-marketing remains one of the favorites among B2B brands (and agencies like us) for its direct impact, efficacy, and ‘tangible’ ROI.
There are any many ways in which you may put your tele-marketers to use, such as cold tele-calling and database-defined-tele-calling. However, you may also align them to take further the process of B2B lead generation from where, maybe, your digital marketing campaigns or webinar marketing campaigns, had left it. Don’t write off your LinkedIn campaigns or webinars or podcasts as non-performing from the perspective of them being able to generate actual sales or business inquiries, till you have closed the loop, we repeat, closed the loop, with tele-marketing (for the geographies which encourage tele-marketing as a practice, of course).
That’s where a method called ‘Triangulation Calls’ comes into the picture that makes the entire process of lead qualification effective and measurable. Here’s a lowdown of what it is and how it works.
Simply put, Triangulation Call is the process of qualifying a lead generated via outbound or inbound marketing campaigns & assessing if the lead has the potential of converting into sales by setting up a call between your sales team and the prospective lead. Over this call a lead is assessed on any one of the lead qualification criterion, the most popular of them being BANT criteria - Budget, Authority, Need, and Time.
Triangulation Calls give insights into some of the most hard-hitting marketing KPIs such as Valid Lead Ratio, Lead Conversion Ratio, Cost Per Campaign Valid Lead, Cost Per Business Valid Lead and Average Cost of Acquiring a Paying Customer. Without these KPI what good any B2B marketing campaign can be, isn’t it? Now compare these KPIs with the KPI you receive from standalone social media marketing campaigns, Email campaigns or webinars such as Impressions, Clicks, Click-Through Rates, Open Rates, Click Rates, Registrations and Attendees.
Further, with Triangulation Calls, you can objectively rate the quality of each lead basis the conversation over the call and use that to align your direct sales team (or channel sales teams) to pursue them further in order of their rating and priority.
You can sense the amount of time and effort this can save for your sales teams which often end up wasting time on not-so-good leads.
Lead quality is always an issue and hence this process helps in vetting lead quality
Helps sales teams to focus on leads which are more likely to convert
Gives insights to what prospects are looking for in the market. In a way it’s a primary research mechanism or a feedback mechanism as well
If you are good with creating only awareness about your business in the market and expanding your addressable marketing universe with Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), then maybe only standalone campaigns are enough. However, if what you need is serious business inquiries, and eventually product sales, then ‘closing the loop’ with integrated marketing campaigns (read, lead nurturing campaigns) and Triangulation Calls is inevitable.
What about leads which get dropped over Triangulation Calls even though they seem qualified as per BANT criteria? Or about leads which don’t even make it to the point of Triangulation calls? Are those any good or they just need to be kicked-out of your marketing database?
That’s for another day, subscribe to our blog to stay tuned.