The last year was a tough one on most companies starting with the banking crisis, the financial downturn and then the entire world economy falling to pieces. While B2C markets reached all time lows, B2B marketers were not spared either but towards the end of the year a lot of the conversations changed from “we are all doomed!” to “what do we have to do to pick up sales and how do we generate more leads?”. The goals were quite clear. Number of leads generated have to increase. Budgets wont be increased so the cost per lead has to come down. 

ROI has become the keyword and investing in quality leads at a lower cost is what it’s all about. While inbound lead generation has become a very strong sustainable approach for a lot of B2B marketers to grow their lead databases, supplementing them with traditional lead sources such as conference lists, business contact lists and company database subscriptions will remain just as important to build the volume of leads in the lead generation funnel. Having access to a fresh supply of quality leads especially at the start of a selling cycle is extremely valuable in being able to qualify and engage more sales ready leads through the year. However high volumes and low costs are not worth much if means you are compromising on quality of data and leads. Eventually its the quality of your leads and business contact databses that will bring you the results so thats the key requirement to insist on when you source new leads.

As you kick off your customer acquisition this year, make sure you are working with a fresh lead database which is relevent, focussed and most importantly, high quality.