With the lack of a constant flow of leads, the sales team is not in a position to complete its targets, which disrupts business growth and expansion. Though it is crucial to generate as many leads as possible, quality over quantity remains the core focus. Customers now do their own research before making a purchase; with this shift, businesses cannot just influence them to make purchases. They need to find the right prospect and show them the solutions that solve their pain points and challenges. This outweighs the significance of lead generation and nurturing. Lead generation and lead nurturing are crucial factors in the B2B sales process, but how are they different? Let’s find out.
Lead Generation Vs. Lead Nurturing: Meaning & Key Differences
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is a pivotal process in B2B sales, where a business identifies and gathers information about potential customers. These are the individuals or companies who have shown interest in your products or services. The process involves building a database with detailed prospect information, gathered through interactions with potential customers. LeadoConnect offers exceptional B2B lead generation services in Mumbai, helping you identify and qualify potential leads, thereby saving you time and resources.
Why Generate Leads?
The purpose of generating leads is to acquire MQL (marketing qualified leads), which are potential customers who have shown interest in your products or services. These leads are not yet ready to make a purchase, but they are more likely to become customers compared to other leads. Once these MQLs are further qualified and deemed ready for sales engagement, they become SQL (sales qualified leads). This is an integral part of the sales process. Generating leads is a process of creating anticipation around specific products and services to bring new customers into the sales pipeline, which can be done through inbound or outbound marketing.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing in the B2B context is about more than just guiding leads through the buyer journey. It’s about building relationships. The sales team needs to understand the needs of the MQL based on their purchase journey, job title, and role, and use this understanding to foster trust and engagement.
Why Nurture Leads?
Most of the leads are not ready to make a purchase, so to convert an MQL to SQL (sales qualified leads) and ultimately to customers, you need to engage with them to build trust.
Improve Leads With Best Lead Nurturing Strategies
- Personalize Content Marketing: You need to understand the buyer persona. Organise leads accordingly and create customized content tailored to their needs, goals, interests and other aspects.
- Content for Every Stage: Lead nurturing is offering potential customers content that guides them throughout the buying journey. Make use of different content types that address pain points and challenges and distribute this content across different channels such as email, social media, paid ads, websites, etc.
- Lead Scoring: Score leads according to their browsing history and social media interaction. Lead scoring helps identify the leads that are most likely to convert into sales opportunities.
- Sales & Marketing Team are On the Same Page: Both teams need to be on the same page to contribute to the lead nurturing. The marketing team is responsible for generating leads and creating content that guides potential customers through the buyer journey. The sales team, on the other hand, needs to know at which stage of the buyer journey they need to step in to convert these leads into customers. This collaboration is crucial for successful lead nurturing.
Lead Generation Vs. Lead Nurturing: Which is Better?
Lead generation and lead nurturing go hand-in-hand. You need to focus on both if you want to generate lead-quality leads and guide through the buyer’s journey until they are ready to convert. After getting qualified leads via lead generation, nurture them until they convert into meaningful and high-intent customers.
Key Differences Between Lead Generation & Lead Nurturing
So, when it comes to expanding a business, both- lead generation and lead nurturing should be viewed as different processes but ultimately the same. Lead generation helps to find potential buyers, while lead nurturing allows you to engage, develop trust and increase chances of conversion.
At LeadoConnect- the best B2B lead generation company in India, our team of experts helps you nurture leads down the sales funnel with our inbound and outbound marketing strategies and high-quality database to convert prospects into customers. To avail of our exceptional services, get in touch with us today.
