TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES TO POWER UP YOUR PIPELINE

Dental Lab Marketing - Lead Generation

When it comes to lead generation, quality leads can be very important for your dental lab. 

Your team closes deals faster and with more energy when they’re dealing with quality sales leads. But when they’re working with poor leads, they lose motivation and end up in a vicious cycle of overworking to find leads, only to discover they’re not qualified at all and having to start again.

With the right dental lab lead generation strategies and tools in place, you can ensure your sales team always focuses their time and energy in the right place and with the right leads.

Sales lead generation drives the whole sales funnel 

Sales lead generation is the key element of a healthy sales pipeline—especially its earliest and widest part: the top of the sales funnel.

A sales pipeline that’s filled to the brim means that there’s plenty of leads to work on, making it easier to deal with sales quotas and expectations.

However, potential issues come up when the leads entering the pipeline aren’t of great quality. If that’s the case, it can set your sales team’s success for several reasons:

• Leads that only look good, but turn out to be a poor fit for your service, could give your sales team false confidence
• Your sales reps will spend valuable time chasing these leads only to discover they were never going to buy in the first place
• Your team won’t have time to focus on quality leads, which will dilute their close rate

As a result, sales targets won’t get hit, morale can crash and, the worst-case scenario, your team won’t bring in the revenue the company needs them to.

At first, you may not see a problem with lead generation. Instead, you’ll see a drop in performance, a couple of missed targets and a longer-than-usual sales cycle.

If your sales results start frequently dropping below the usual results even though nothing about your sales pipeline or process changed, make sure to review your sales lead generation.

Because no matter how good your sales process is, it won’t turn bad leads into good ones—and you often won’t know they’re bad until you’ve spent hours on them.

You can always recognize a healthy dental lab sales pipeline when:

• A solid mix of leads enters the funnel
• Deals move through at a steady rate
• A predictable number of deals are won

If this becomes less of a case even though your sales activities and process haven’t changed, it’s time to reconsider where your leads are coming from and the criteria your team is using to qualify them.

The ideal lead checklist: which leads are worth your time?

When your sales reps notice patterns in their best leads, a checklist will help them look for similar patterns in newly generated leads.

Start with this checklist and expand it based on your individual situation, such as industry or company size you’re selling to. If your lead checks the following boxes, they are worth the effort!

Basic criteria:

☐ Prospect matches ideal customer persona

☐ Business challenge aligns with solution

☐You have access to the decision maker(s)

Bonus criteria:

☐ They have come from a customer referral

☐ They are an existing customer

☐ You have had previous touchpoints

When you know what your ideal lead looks like, you can easily prioritize your leads and optimize your time, which will lead to an enhanced sales performance.

Based on this checklist, here are some areas to further deconstruct in your search for the perfect lead.

What do your best customers look like?

Look at your existing customers and identify any commonalities they have. Ideally, look for those customers that present obvious success traits due to your product, such as a link between the time they’ve spent using it and their growth rate.

Evaluate information about them such as:

• Industry
• Company size
• Number of employees
• Annual revenue
• Decision maker(s) and main point(s) of contact with your sales team
• Geography
• Features they’ve needed and used the most

What does the path to purchase look like for them?

What are the elements that led to closed deals? What has influenced your lead’s purchase decision? Answering these questions will help you define a list of indicators of best leads.

Look for the following patterns in your past successful leads:

• Attitude towards change
• Factors that influence decisions
• Pattern of consideration and decision-making
• Length of buying cycle
• Impact of internal influencers
• Typical roadblocks and objections
• Year-on-year growth

Do they pass the BANT pre-qualification?

BANT isn’t the be-all-end-all way to define whether a lead will be ideal, but it will help your sales reps anticipate objections, questions, the potential deal size, and their bandwidth.

Maybe most important of all, it will help your team prioritize leads and focus their efforts where they will result in positive returns right now.

The BANT checklist is based on:

• Budget: The size of the business, annual turnover or what your prospect is currently spending on a solution
• Authority: This is focused on the lead’s level of influence. Are the decisions made by a committee or a single head of department/company?
• Need: Is your prospect similar to any of your existing customers? What are their main goals and challenges?
• Timing: Prospect’s typical buying cycle and potential urgency of their need

The sales lead generation techniques

With all of the details on what a perfect lead looks like, what does good sales lead generation looks like?

All lead generation can be sorted into two large categories: manual and automated. As with most things, they both come with advantages and downsides.

Manual sales lead generation makes the most of your sales reps’ expert research skills. It allows them to put their vast industry knowledge into practice.

The downside? It could cost your team hours to find even a few leads that seem like good ones to invest their time into. And even with all of their lead generation talents, some of these leads may turn out to be a complete waste of time.

Sales automated lead generation clearly tackles the time-intensive element of manual lead generation. It enables your sales reps to come into work knowing there will be leads waiting for them.

However, automated lead generation still requires human touch once it’s time to have conversations with these leads. If the automation system prioritizes the number of leads rather than their quality, it can trap your team into a seemingly full pipeline that takes forever to qualify.

Which path is the best one to make your sales team most efficient?

The answer is a healthy mix of both. 

With a clever approach to automated lead generation, you can ensure only the highest quality leads reach your team.

They can then invest their time, energy, and sharp negotiation and closing skills to turn hot leads into happy customers.

Eight sales lead generation techniques 

Qualified website traffic

Let’s start with the obvious: people who visit your website are likely to have some interest in what you have to say.

Your website traffic is arguably the most untapped source of highly qualified leads for your sales team.

Why?

Because even though some people will make the effort to sign up for your free trial, ask for a demo, or download a resource, they only make up a tiny percentage of visitors to your website.

The rest, no matter how interested they might be, simply leave and possibly never come back.

Does this make everyone that visits your website a qualified lead?

Definitely not.

Those that visited a single page and left after 10 seconds probably weren’t as interested as someone who spent 25 minutes reading your blog posts or comparing your pricing plans.

In other words, although many of your visitors don’t leave a trace, such as filling out a contact form, they still reveal their interests and current pain points with their behavior on your website.

The solution? Stop seeing your website visitors as just people who stumbled upon you. Their actions are saying something, and you better listen.

Our tool of choice for sales lead generation from website traffic is Leadfeeder.

To generate leads from your website traffic, all you need is good old Google Analytics along with Leadfeeder—a tool that matches your traffic with company information.

With Leadfeeder, you can see a feed of companies whose employees that have visited your website.

Leadfeeder also pulls company information that’s available online, such as:

• Company size by number of employees
• City and country
• Industry
• Website

You’ll also see the source of that visit (such as Google search), the number of pages visited, and the length of the session.

This means you can create custom feeds and filters to only see leads that have visited specific pages (so you know what they’re looking for), those that spent a long time on your website (so you know who’s really interested in your brand), or those in specific locations and/or industries.

With DentalLabSupport lead generation service, you will always have a steady stream of new leads. DentalLabSupport also provides a Sales & Marketing CRM called LabCell CRM, a sales software developed exclusively for dental laboratories which is included with your service. In short, you can have a hyper-qualified list of leads sent right into your LabCell CRM dashboard without any extra work and by simply plugging Leadfeeder into your analytics and setting up the right filters.

For more information, please contact us at 1.888.715.9099 or info@dentallabsupport.com, visit us www.DentalLabSupport.com.