Lead generation for enterprise software VARs. Quick start guide

Lead generation for enterprise software is a challenging, yet critical task for any regional VAR or a local system integrator, inspired by growth. And here is why.

Lead generation for enterprise software is a challenging, yet critical task for any regional VAR or a local system integrator, inspired by growth. And here is why. Now let us discuss the basics of content marketing and how to leverage it for attracting new business. The typical sales process for enterprise software involves the following steps:

• Demand generation

• Lead nurturing and qualification to marketing qualified leads (MQLs)

• MQLs processing and conversion into a sales opportunity

• Winning the sales opportunity and booking revenue

What is a lead and lead generation?

Lead is a person who has engaged with your company and left her contact information. Lead generation is a process of attracting strangers, sparking, and capturing their interest in your company’s offerings along with their contact information. Nowadays, prospects as soon as they have realized the problem, would search the internet for the proper solution before calling a salesperson. Who knows what they will find? Google Search is a very competitive place… This is why successful B2B software companies rely on content marketing to attract leads while they are still discovering the problem, and before they started searching for any solution.

Step 1: Capture

Think about fishing, what it takes to catch a fish? First, you need to know a lot about a particular type of fish: where it lives, which food it prefers, what are the best season and the time of the day for fishing. Only if you’ve prepared the right bait, you may expect a bite. Fish may do its things, but when it sees your bait, it feels hunger and can’t refuse it. Similarly, content marketing requires you to understand your target buyer’s profile, her needs, and habits in great details. You tune your content to capture the attention of the ideal buyer at the right moment in the right place and lead her along the buyer’s journey to the buying decision. Free search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search engine marketing (SEM) allows you to make your content visible in the search engine outcome by tying your message to the right keywords, which your ideal buyer will use while searching for a solution. This assumes that a potential buyer already understands the problem and is actively looking for an answer. Social networks and online professional communities allow marketers to proactively reach out to prospective buyers and invoke this understanding by emphasizing the problem and educating them about possible solutions.

Step 2: Nurture

When you catch a fish, you clean and cook it before you realize its value by eating it. When you capture a raw lead, you nurture and qualify it, before you realize its value in the form of business opportunity. Lead nurturing is an essential step in content marketing, since the lead, who consumed your educational content is not necessarily ready to buy your product or service yet. In this case, you feed her additional content and observe the reaction. Typically the buyer goes through multistep buyer’s journey, the simplest version of which includes three stages:

• Awareness stage, when the buyer realizes the problem

• Consideration stage, when the buyer is looking for possible solutions

• Decision stage, when the buyer compares options and chooses a solution

Lead nurturing allows us to take the buyer from the awareness stage to the consideration stage when she starts looking into different solutions and considers ours. If we do it right, there is a high chance that the buyer will choose our solution or at least express a particular interest in it, since it solves the problem, which we helped to discover. At this time, we mark this lead as an MQL (marketing qualified lead) and pass it to the sales team for further qualification and conversion into a sales opportunity or SQL (sales qualified lead), which will be developed and closed.

Lead generation for enterprise software is a team sport

Now, what is required from a regional VAR or a solution provider to implement digital lead generation and lead nurturing? Typically you need three components:

• Content

• Contacts

• Infrastructure

Good news is that content we receive from the software vendor. Local contacts we can collect via personal networks, internet, social media, local professional communities, and other sources.