How Working With A Third-Party Lead Generation Service Can Bring More Leads in Autumn and Winter
Lead Generation in Autumn and Winter Doesn’t Mean More Staff or Stress
As the fiscal year comes to a close, it’s time for businesses to prepare for the coming year. Often we become extremely driven to push our professionals to generate new leads for our products and/or services; unfortunately, this pressure can interfere with their work-life balance in such a way that we could lose their talent in the future.
True talent is valuable and hard to replace, not to mention the expertise they possess on your product. Often, it’s better to augment their capabilities with automation and complementary services, or supporting staff, to take some of the pressure off of them. After all, they do a fantastic job the rest of the year; they shouldn’t be punished because your ambitions may be exceeding your team’s capabilities. Increasing their KPI requirements only increases stress and the likelihood of them seeking a career change.
That’s where lead generation services come into play. Having a massive staff to generate leads during the mad rush before January 1st is cumbersome, requiring more staff, supporting policies, legal advisors, and expenses than most of your departments combined. Instead of hiring seasonal sales and lead generation staff, which requires training, and printed materials, and poses a risk to your organization’s reputation, outsourcing to vetted professionals is the most logical solution.
Why Businesses Prepare for January 1st
When dealing with B2B, each business generally prepares its expenses and budget for the following year based on previous revenue and projected performance. Due to this, the majority of B2B contracts and client’s you’ll receive will begin communication in autumn, or late summer. This is why it’s incredibly important to get started early, but not too early. You want to catch them while they’re preparing for the following year’s budget, which means Q4 is the best time to target B2B prospects.
Alternatively, B2C targeting in Q4 is also beneficial. Consumers prepare New Year’s resolutions, receive their bonuses, ready themselves for Black Friday deals, prepare for the holiday season in general, and start to think about what to spend their tax returns on. It’s a time of new beginnings and new expenses for businesses and consumers alike.
Cold Outreach Using Emails for More Leads
One of the most time-consuming and frustrating tasks for business owners and professionals is lead generation, especially when utilizing cold outreach. Cold emails are just like cold calls, but with a twist. Instead of locating phone numbers, and inevitably making potential leads crazy, email addresses are much easier to obtain and result in far less irritation on the potential lead’s behalf. Emailing them with cold email templates that encourage replies, boost interest, and spread the brand and product awareness are the most beneficial campaigns.
However, ensuring that they’re tailored to your ICP’s demographics requires insight that can take time to develop.
Consumers and clients need to know that your goods and services are valuable to their needs. If your email is too vague, it might put them off. Alternatively, if your email is too detailed, they may find it too tedious to read. Finding a balance in your campaign’s outreach strategy is of the utmost importance.
Utilizing a Third-Party Lead Generation Service
While your staff may have already developed methods to reach potential leads, creating an outreach strategy from scratch without a team of specialists requires a lot of trial and error.
Outsourcing lead generation is much safer than you’d think. An outsourced lead generation company must maintain its own reputation, as well as your organization’s. Due to this heightened level of responsibility, they can be considered far more reliable than onboarding new staff with weeks of paid training, who are susceptible to making numerous mistakes at the most critical time of the year.
When you choose to outsource, you will be asked to give as much concise information as possible regarding your product or service. Without this information, they cannot adequately represent your organization. After they have this information, they begin to develop an outreach strategy.
What Else is Involved in Cold Emails?
Automation is by far one of the most crucial factors to consider when discussing a lead generation campaign. While calls are more personal, most countries have very strict laws, and many cultures frown upon them.
Another key factor is data management. Without proper data management, tracking potential leads is impossible. There is far too much data generated during a campaign to carelessly organize the information. Imagine a list of thousands of names in a notepad file, this would get out of hand extremely fast.
Next on this list is a follow-up schedule. Without a plan for following up with generated leads, such as sales appointments, there’s no sense in having the campaign, to begin with. Typically, leads are handed over to the hiring party in an outsourced lead generation arrangement. What you do with these leads is up to you. However, you should ask your third-party professionals for advice on how to proceed, and what time limits they would recommend. If a cold email generates a warm lead, nothing makes that warm lead cold than time.
Last, but certainly not least, a team of vetted professionals makes or breaks a campaign. Without the right leadership at the helm, any process falls apart before it begins. However, nothing falls apart faster than sales and lead generation without the right talent onboard.
Leads Don’t Equal Closed Deals
When you have a list of leads, even if they number in the thousands, the percentages of conversion to closed deals should be measured to adequately assess the effectiveness of your sales staff.
These metrics will also help you determine your average cost-to-profit margins so that you can assess your marketing strategy, product’s value to your consumers or clients, and unit economics.
The unit economy is the cost of “one unit” to the end user; if your goods or service is based on a subscription model, you can use your monthly charge rate as a baseline for one unit. This is important to measure so that you can balance costs and revenue to avoid going in the red, while also maintaining demand for your goods or service by keeping your price within your target ICP’s acceptable price range.
TLDR
Lead generation is difficult to manage in Q4 due to the required support staff, making third-party lead generation services extremely valuable and cost-saving. Q4 is the most important time of the year to generate leads as your potential clients and consumers are planning their Q1 budget, including their projected expenses for the entirety of the following year. Cold email campaigns are much softer on your organization’s reputation than cold calls; and, a third-party lead generation service will be mindful of your organization’s reputation as their reputation depends on satisfying your needs.
If you’re looking for a professional lead generation service, we here at SalesAR know how to generate more leads in autumn and winter using cold email outreach strategies. Check out some of our Case Studies and reach out with any questions you might have about how to set more sales appointments in Q4.
