Strategising For Success With Your Building Products Business

The 7 pillars of lead generation create structure within marketing, sales and the overall business function of a building products company. By following them consistently, lead generation will provide your business with steady growth and profitability.

All 7 pillars work in tandem and without each other the structure crumbles. To create quality leads which your sales team can convert, all 7 pillars must be in place.

Each week, I’ll be exploring each pillar in-turn, helping you develop  a clear pathway to generating leads for your building product business.  

The first pillar is creating a winning strategy. Imagine this as the central column around which the other pillars are built. A mature and established strategy will guide your business through every stage of the process, and be a detailed plan to direct your building products company towards success.

What is lead generation strategy?

Strategy is the basis for how quality leads are going to be generated for your sales team to convert. It needs to encompass marketing and sales and be linked to your overall business goals. It can be broken down into a clear set of elements which describe the sense of direction for the rest of the process, this includes:

• Your mission
• Your vision
• Your goals
• And much more!

48% of respondents to a recent study describe their B2B lead generation strategy and planning as advanced, (London Research, The State of B2B Lead Generation). Which highlights why it’s so important to create a culture that uses a strategy to guide your focus as you manage and handle lead generation. Sticking to your strategy gives you a greater understanding of where your building products business is headed.

What goes into your strategy?

Vision and Mission

Your vision is described as how your business would look in a perfect world, and your mission is the action you’re going to take to achieve this. Understanding both of these gives you and everyone at your company a clear end goal. For lead generation, it is vital to understand the volume of leads that you need to generate at each stage of your journey to achieve your vision.

SMART Goals

These are targets that specify what you want to achieve with in a timescale. SMART stands for:

• Specific- What do you want to achieve?
• Measurable- How will you track your progress?
• Achievable- Is it realistic?
• Relevant- Does it encompass what’s happening in your industry right now?
• Time-Based- How long will you take to achieve it

SMART goals need to show how marketing has directly increased sales, otherwise it’s difficult to understand the benefits of marketing and ROI of your activity. Sales goals are set and tracked using well established methods; marketing goals can be, too. Examples of KPI’s to understand lead generation are;

• enquiry to order conversion rate
• average order value
• monthly enquiry volume

These goals create a structure for your strategy and direct your operations to ensure you achieve success.

Buyer Personas and profiles

Buyer personas and profiles are ideal customer that your building products company would like to sell to, based on data such as location and company type. To create them you’ll need to understand what makes them tick and how you can leverage this to get their attention. At the very least, you need to include the type of customers you want and how your company will fulfil that.

Any content which you create needs to be done with these buyer profiles in mind to make sure you’re creating helpful content marketing to aid them in their research and therefore become more likely to buy from you. In lead generation, this means encouraging them to fill out forms, pick up the phone or submit enquires to your site. Getting the content right is critical in lead generation; we will explore more of this in Part 2 of The 7 Pillars of Lead Generation.

Buyer’s Journey

Once you have an understanding of the type of person you’re looking to attract you can map their buyer journey, which encompasses 3 stages:

• Awareness- When a person first discovers your company
• Consideration- When a person takes interest in your company
• Decision- When a person decides to buy from you

Consideration and awareness belong to your marketing team; they should market the right content to the right buyer and move them through the journey. You’ll need to ensure that your site is loaded with the right content and information to give you the competitive advantage.

In the decision stage, the buyer is ready to make a purchase and speak to your sales team. To increase chances of conversion the buyer has to be properly nurtured in the previous stages to make this successful.

The Buyer’s Journey is different for every company. You should map it out for each buyer persona to better understand how to market to them. The more focused your marketing; the better your chances of generating quality leads.

Conclusion

Developing a strategy is one of the most important aspects of developing your lead generation campaign. It is your starting block for the entire process and guides you along the way.

Your strategy is made up of several factors beginning with your building product’s company’s vision and mission.

You should couple this with your buyer personas and map out their journey, to guide how you will target your content later in the process.

Would you like to find out more about how lead generation can help you grow better?

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