Recently, I’ve stumbled across this question on Quora, “How do I generate high-value B2B leads?”

With so much stuff out there, lead generation seems to be a piece of cake to someone who has built a B2B product/service. After all, you’ve put your heart and soul into it.

Nevertheless, when you try to generate leads online, nothing seems to work as well as you’d like. There are some leads indeed, but most of them are of poor quality.

Why is that? Can you do something about it?

Of course you can.

How to generate high-value B2B leads

Here’s my take on online lead generation and the best strategies to funnel in quality leads in 2019.

We’ll go over:

• How the Ideal Customer Profile influences lead quality, and how to revise it.
• How appearance influences the quality of your leads, and how to take care of it.
• How to reach out to high-value leads and get a consistent flow of them.

1. Establish what quality means to you

Quirky as it sounds, I’m sure no two businesses have the same definition of quality. While there are many synonyms of the word itself, the way we interpret it depends solely on our business. So, how can we find out what you mean by the word “quality”?

The simplest way to define “quality” is through building Ideal customer profile. It will help you guide through a qualification phase. Once you have it ready, you can test any lead that you have and tell whether it’s a high-value lead or not.

Here’s a previous post on this blog about building an ICP.

"But there’s a caveat I need to cover here. Your ICP gets outdated with time. Your customer profile needs to be updated once in a while. Best to do that every one and a half years or so. Here’s how we keep ICP up to date at Woodpecker.

ICP will be your litmus test of quality. Once you know what quality means to you, generating high-value leads will be a no brainer."

2. Your appearance matters

You need to appear as a high-value company so high-value companies like to work with you.

There are three basic things that will make you look so. You need to prune your website, produce content that is a testament to your value, and make sure your pricing page reflects that value.

Prune your website

You have a great lead generation weapon in your arsenal: your website. A navigational structure of your website, the user experience it provides, and the persuasiveness of your copywriting.

If you want to generate high-value leads, you need to show that you yourself are a high-quality company. Because a website is like an online business card, use it to your advantage. 

Here’s a checklist for you to measure your website against:

1. It is easily scannable.
2. It is easy to tell what you’re selling.
3. You have a navigational panel.
4. You have a contact page with an address.
5. You can easily find your way back to the home page.
6. A contact form is easy to find and to fill out.

Those are the basics suggestions. I encourage you to have a UX designer on the team. They help in making a high-quality leads sign up form for your offering.

Make content that proves your value

Your website is just a start. You have yet another ace up your sleeve to make you look like a high-value company – one that will show your personality and expertise and prove your value, namely, content marketing.

Content marketing is great, yet it’s an inbound B2B marketing tactic. Therefore, you need to be patient before you can see ROI.

However, when you couple content marketing with outbound lead generation, its impact will increase significantly.

I included some of the ideas of what kind of content to produce to boost high-quality lead generation in this article.

Here’s a short sum up:

1. Describe your workflow.
2. Make a customer case study.
3. Gather customer reviews.
4. Interview thought leaders.

TIP: Align your sales and marketing to work together on content designed to catch a high-value B2B lead’s attention. Your sales team can say who a high-value lead is for your business. Your marketing team, on the other hand, can design a communication matrix that would appeal to the high-value lead defined by the salespeople. Also, you can ask sales people to point to the business people who would be willing to talk marketing.

The possibilities are immense.

Work on your pricing page

The pricing page is indeed the selling point. Or at least, treat it that way. At the end, high-value leads will consult your pricing page before making buying decisions.

Remember that your price is a kind of marketing strategy in and of itself. It defines your place among your competitors.

There are some general rules when it comes to building a good pricing page. When you have a SaaS business, I direct you to the masters of pricing strategy, Price Intelligently. It has a ton of useful content on SaaS pricing.

Make sure your pricing page is clear and comprehensive. It highlights the differences in features between the pricing plans, and, ultimately, it clearly communicates what the customer is paying for. If you offer a service, write the copy on the entire process of providing the service. If you don’t know where to start, use one of these CPQ software tools.

We’re in the middle of working out our pricing at Woodpecker. And I dare say, it’s a long process.

3. Reach out to high-value leads personally

After you defined your quality and worked on your website appearance, you can proceed to generate high-value leads.

In order to be sure you don’t run out of high-value leads, reach out to the leads personally.

Why?

Because you of all people know what sort of a lead you want to bring in. That’s why you’ve worked out your Ideal Customer Profile.

And what better way to reach out to the lead personally than via cold email?

With cold emailing you can:

• Contact any business in the world.
• Keep track of your emails.
• React at the right time.
• Remain human while automating.
• Modify your emails.

So, how do you do that?

How to write cold emails to high-value B2B leads?

When it comes to writing cold emails, I recommend this quick formula that includes six elements.

1. Subject line: A key to your message. Make it short, catchy, and personalized to your target. If you don’t know where to start from. I recommend thinking about your prospect’s needs. Do they need to change the way they do X? Do they need to innovate? Find out.
2. “From:” line: This line appears next to the subject line. Don’t forget to set it up. It can have many forms. My “from:” lines look like this: “Mary from Woodpecker.co.” Yours could be different. It depends on your target. Are they more formal? Then use your full name.
3. Introduction: The first line or two of your cold email. Don’t introduce yourself here. The signature is meant for that. Catch the prospect's attention. Praise their work. Change the focus to them.
4. Value Proposition: This is the part when you tell your lead why you reached out. Try to find some benefits of your product and make it appealing enough for the lead. Avoid listing the features or characteristics. Try to paint them a picture.
5. Call-to-Action (CTA): A short and actionable sentence that tells the message recipient what you want them to do after they read your message. It can be a quick reply or a Calendly sign up.
6. Signature: It functions as a way of showing who you are. To increase responses, include your photo, HQ address, and full name.

That’s just the basics. Let’s move on to email personalization.

Personalize the email to show you’ve done your research

Cold email personalization is what finally converts your B2B high-value lead. They need to be sure you've sent this email only to them, and no one else.

Find some custom information, different for every high-value lead on your list.

Here’s an example of adding personalization to a cold email:

Hi ,

does amazing job with .

Maybe I can help speed up the process? Working with you would be a real pleasure. I have loads of experience with .

Let’s chat. Message me back, and I can arrange a quick meeting.

All the best,

All the things in curly brackets are snippets meant for personalization. At least, we call them that at Woodpecker.co. Maybe you’ve heard another term, such as “mail merge fields,” “custom fields,” or “dynamic fields.”

All in all, it doesn’t matter. What you do is use a cold email automation tool to merge the snippets with your email template, and there you have it: a highly personalized email.

Send two-to-three follow-up emails to get replies

We live in a busy world. Barely anyone replies to the first email, so you need to follow up. As far as our research goes, you need to send two-to-three follow-ups to make your campaign effective.

That’s not a lot. Yet, each of your emails needs to be one-of-a-kind and provide value to the high-value lead on your list.

Avoid passive-aggressive statements like, “You haven’t replied to my previous email.”

Head on this article on follow-up email to learn the art of following up.

TIP: If you want to generate a predictable flow of leads, I recommend a classic book that should stand on every business’s bookshelf: ”Predictable Revenue” by Aaron Ross.

Back to you

As you can see, generating high-value B2B leads isn’t too hard once you get into the swing of it. Just define what quality means to you, work on your company page, and design a replicable outreach process to put everything on autopilot. If three tips isn't enough, there's plenty more where that came from. 

Ready to learn more about generating leads in 2019? Learn how your sales organization can leverage social selling.