Sales teams run on leads.
But just like a performance vehicle, a high-performing sales team needs quality gas (leads) to do their best.
This means that as you set up to run your next lead generation campaign, the focus shouldn’t be on the quantity of leads as much as the quality of leads.
Quality, in the context of sales, being a proxy for how well they match your ICP (ideal company profile).
In this article, we’re going to guide you through the process of generating qualified warm leads that allow your sales team to perform at their optimum.
We’ll discuss how to best set yourself up for success in a lead gen campaign before diving into six powerful tactics for generating better leads. Finally, we’ll sign off with a discussion on how to get the most out of your leads once you’ve got them in your CRM.
What is a Lead Generation Campaign?
A lead generation campaign is a marketing endeavor designed with the express goal of generating leads.
A lead in this context is any person who has expressed interest in your company, product, or brand and has handed over their context details (generally an email address but sometimes a phone number) in exchange for value such as:
- An ebook
- A free trial
- A webinar
- A free interactive tool
Is Lead Generation a Variable Strategy?
Lead generation gets a lot of bad press in marketing circles.
That’s because lead gen campaigns are often measured exclusively on the number of leads they generate. More leads equals a more successful lead generation campaign.
This sets up some bad incentives, mainly that marketing ends up being too focused on pushing more leads through to sales, regardless of how much of a fit they are for the product in question or the degree of purchase intent shown.
Take, for example, this ebook about lead gen from HubSpot.
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If I download this guide as part of my research for writing this blog post, I could be considered a lead.
But in reality, HubSpot knows nothing about my potential fit for their product, and I haven’t shown an iota of purchase intent.
For this reason, lead gen is often thought of as an example of bad marketing focused on vanity metrics.
And it can be. But it doesn’t have to be.
If, instead, you:
- Set out clear expectations as to what defines a qualified lead and when they’re fit for sales interactions
- Focus on building lead generation devices that actually demonstrate purchase intent
- Use lead generation as a device for capturing demand built as part of a demand generation campaign
Then lead gen can actually be a super viable strategy for fueling sales teams with high-quality, high-intent leads that they truly have a chance of closing.
To achieve that, you’ve got to do a bit of pre-work.
Let me explain.
How to Get Set up For a Lead Generation Campaign
Before you start running ads, producing a content plan, or marketing a free trial in order to attract more leads, there are a couple of things you’ll want to have nailed down.
Taking your time to clarify expectations, build an efficient software stack, and align sales and marketing on what a lead even is, will help ensure you see a solid ROI.
Make sure you’re clear on your audience
First step is to get super clear on who it is you are targeting.
Frameworks like ICP and customer personas are a good move here, but you need to do more than just create static documents.
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Work to create alignment between all GTM (go to market) teams on who your target audience really is.
Then, only prospects that truly fit your key ICP criteria can go through to sales as a “lead.”
Determine how you’re going to categorize leads
Not all leads are equal, even if they fit your targeting criteria.
Some leads will be in the early stages of the customer journey. Others will be poised to buy. Some will barely scrape past the minimum company size outlined in your ICP, while others will far exceed it.
To distinguish between different lead types — allowing your sales team to prioritize outreach and your tech stack to accurately route leads to the right sales rep — you’ll need to set up some lead categorization guidelines.
Cold/warm/hot is a reasonable framework where you can set up lead scoring rules based on engagement criteria to determine how hot a lead is.
Others use the “qualification” framework to categorize leads:
- IQL (information qualified lead): The lead is just trying to find an answer to a question.
- MQL (marketing qualified lead): These are warm leads that are more familiar with your brand and product.
- PQL (product qualified lead): You’ve established that the prospective customer is a good fit for your product and perhaps vice versa,
- SQL (sales qualified lead): The lead has expressed an active interest in your product or service and is fit for a salesperson interaction.
By the way, we’ll cover lead routing and scoring a bit later on in our discussion on what to do post-lead gen.
Decide on your marketing channels
Next step is to decide on the marketing channels you’re going to rely upon to get in front of new eyeballs, drum up interest, and ultimately convert people into leads.
Here are your main options:
- Social media platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook, etc.)
- Email
- SMS
- SEO content (your blog and other search-optimized website pages)
- Content marketing efforts (webinars, ebooks, guides, podcasts, etc.)
- Affiliate marketing
- Influencers
- UGC (user-generated content), reviews, and referrals
Pretty much all of these are going to be used to drive traffic back to your website, where you’ll use a dedicated landing page and some form of lead capture device — a downloadable ebook, entrance to a webinar, a free trial, etc. — to convert that visitor into a lead.
As such, your website and the landing pages you host within it aren’t really channels per se. They’re kind of a non-negotiable as part of your lead gen campaign.
Get your tech stack set up
Finally, you’ll want to make sure you’re set up on the tech level.
To a certain degree, you won’t be able to nail this all in one go.
You’ll learn as your lead gen campaign progresses about what specific features and functions you need, and you will be constantly updating and reintegrating your SaaS stack.
However, a good starting point would be to have something in each of these categories ticked off:
- A CRM to act as the hub for your lead gen campaign and to store customer contact details
- Advertising solutions to drive traffic to your site
- A landing page builder to design campaign-specific landing pages on our site
- Lead capture tools like forms
- A chatbot tool to engage visitors on your site and convert them into sales leads
- Webinar hosting solutions
- A lead routing solution to ensure the right prospects reach the right sales reps in a timely manner
- Email and maybe SMS marketing software
- A meeting scheduler tool so prospects can book time on a sales rep’s calendar
6 Powerful Lead Generation Tactics
Okay, now we get to the good stuff:
How to actually bring in all those hot prospects.
A quick note first. This is not the be-all and end-all list of lead gen tactics. There are dozens of options available to you, and any one of them might work well for you.
What these are, however, are some of the most commonly used and highly effective strategies for pulling in warm leads.
1. Build a media brand
Content is very often the backbone of lead generation campaigns.
Typically, this takes the form of gated content like ebooks, reports containing original research, or webinars — all of which require potential customers to fork over their email addresses in order to access.
In our opinion, you’re much better off thinking of content as something your company produces as a media brand rather than a lead generation device per se.
Let’s take a look at HockeyStack, a GTM analytics tool, as an example.
They’ve gone as far as creating an entirely different brand, naming their media empire The Flow.
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The Flow is kind of like a B2B Netflix.
One of many series available on The Flow is “Can You Dashboard It?” where their GTM team member Nate Branscome shows how real marketers use the product to track key metrics.
And the lead gen?
To access the content available on The Flow, you’ve got to subscribe, using, of course, an email address.
2. Tap into your partner network
One of the best ways to generate leads is to get warm referrals from brands you’re working closely with.
These brands should be in your general vertical but not direct competitors.
For us, those are companies like Salesflow, Sendspark, and Letterdrop. They’re all broadly in the GTM space, but aren’t an overlapping tool competitor for the same share of wallet.
We collaborate with these brands mainly on content, like this webinar with Bethany Stachenfeld of Sendspark.
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That’s a great way to expand the reach of your demand generation content, but we can get a little more direct when it comes to chasing leads.
One of my favorite tools for tapping into the power of a partner network is Reveal.
Reveal syncs partner data into your CRM, automatically mapping over account details and helping you identify new opportunities.
It can tell you, for example, the gaps between the accounts in your CRM and the active accounts a partner has.
We could identify, for instance, an account that Sendspark recently closed but that we don’t have in our sales pipeline.
If we feel that they’re a fit for Warmly’s ICP, we could reach out to the account manager and ask for a warm referral (which will be a much more effective way into a conversation than a cold email).
3. Ask for referrals from existing customers
Speaking of referrals, asking for an introduction to potential customers from existing users is a great one-two combo.
Not only does it deliver quality leads that already trust your brand (because they’ve been referred by someone they know and trust to give good recommendations), but it also provides an opportunity to interact with current paying customers.
A good way to incentivize this behavior is with a simple referral offer like a discount on their next invoice or even a direct payment.
Woodpecker, for example, pays you 20% of the recurring revenue on closed deals as part of their referral program.
4. Go freemium or offer a free trial
Lead generation is all about offering something for free in exchange for contact details.
Why stop at content, though?
What better way to capture interest (and customer data) than by actually giving prospects a taste of your tool?
There are two ways to go about this.
A free trial is a common approach, where the user gets full access to your platform for a set length of time (14 days seems to be the norm), after which they need to whip out their credit card.
This is generally the point when a sales rep reaches out to try and close a deal.
A better alternative here, though, is to:
- Give them at least 30 days (more time in the platform means they’re more likely to embed it in their workflows and be compelled to continue paying).
- Have sales (or a customer success agent) engage early on, helping them to get the most out of the tool from the outset and encouraging adoption.
Freemium is an alternative structure where you offer a simplified version of your product entirely free of charge.
It needs to actually be usable, however. Otherwise, it's just a free trial under a different.
At Warmly, we have a free option available, and many of our customers get value out of it every day.
On our pricing page, prospects can see exactly what the difference is between the free and paid plans in terms of seat, lead enrichment, and feature limitations.
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Both are viable options for generating leads. Generally speaking, though, free trials are better as part of a startup sales motion, as earlier-stage companies haven’t yet validated their ability to convert free users to paid plans.
5. Create an interactive tool
An alternative to the freemium or free trial models is to break out a simple feature into a free interactive tool.
Take SEO research tools Ahrefs.
They offer a selection of free tools, such as a keyword generator or a broken link checker.
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These tools give potential customers a taste of what Ahrefs can offer. Of course, it's just an appetizer (though it's still usable). The mains are available only in the paid plan, and Ahrefs smoothly directs buyers over to the pricing menu.
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6. Drive engagement with an AI chatbot
One of our favorite ways to turn traffic into leads is by engaging website visitors with an AI chatbot.
This works best when you’ve got a visitor identification software platform set up on your website.
This way, you can deanonymize the visitor, sync third-party buying intent and customer data, and have your AI chat tool craft personalized messages that go beyond “What brought you here today?’
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Warmly takes care of all of the above, but a unique feature is the ability to engage customers in an instant live video call.
Here’s how it works:
Once our AI chatbot identifies a level of purchase intent that requires a sales rep interaction, a Slack notification is sent to the account owner or sales team.
Then, sales can take over the chat, offer a live video call, and even close the deal right there.
That’s how brands like Pump use Warmly to drive revenue fast.
Get the case study: How Pump $20,000 closed in the first week using Warmly.
What’s next? Post-lead gen steps
So, you’ve successfully generated some high-quality leads.
Where to from here?
Lead Scoring
The first step here is to score and categorize your leads based on the categories you created back in the prep stage.
In short, you award points to leads based on activities they complete. A form fill for an ebook might be worth 5 points, a webinar attendance might be worth 12, and so on.
Then, you determine the thresholds they need to pass in order to reach certain categories. For example, you might determine that a lead that hits 80 points tips over into the SQL category or is categorized as a warm lead.
You can also set override functions here to consider high-intent actions. For example, if a prospect reviews the pricing page more than three times, they might get upgraded to an SQL regardless of how many points they have.
Inbound marketing tools like Outfunnel are helpful here for automating lead scoring.
Routing
Next comes routing.
This is essentially the process of determining the appropriate sales rep to send a lead to based on factors such as prospect industry, rep availability, or territory distribution, and then mapping those leads over to an account in your CRM and routing them to the right salesperson.
Chili Piper is a solid tool here, and Warmly also has automated qualification and routing workflows built in.
Use lead routing to send urgent, hot leads right through to sales reps, as well as to route scored and categorized leads to an appropriate inbound SDR.
Sales Process Orchestration
Once your leads are scored and routed, its time for your sales process to kick off.
What these steps actually look like depends on your exact sales motion.
You might go straight to a phone call, put a prospect into an email nurturing campaign, or run an omnichannel playbook with personalized and targeted ads, LinkedIn outreach, and dynamic video email.
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Your specific tactics and channels will depend on what your data says works best, but there is one piece of general advice that we can give here:
Automate.
Use modern sales orchestration tools to automate as much of your sales motion as reasonable while using AI to maintain a degree of personalization.
This approach will help you nail speed to lead — the early bird really does get the worm in the sales game — while reducing your total overhead by reducing the number of human reps you’ll need.
Consider this workflow in Warmly:
- A prospect lands on your website after discovering the insightful and educational content you’ve been publishing.
- The person is anonymized, matched to an account in your CRM, and enriched with best-in-class contact, behavioral, and intent data.
- An AI chatbot delivers personalized messaging, engages the visitor, and captures more intent information.
- A synchronized outreach campaign is triggered across LinkedIn and email, synced to your sales tech stack.
- The outreach campaign drives the visitor back to your pricing page, and the prospect signs up for a free trial.
- The prospect is categorized as a high-intent lead and routed to the right sales rep, who receives a notification via Slack to engage.
- The rep schedules a customized demo and consultation call with the customer to help them get the most out of their free trial.
- At the end of the trial period, the rep leverages user behavioral data to connect with the prospects’ buying needs and motivations and closes a paid deal.
Seven of the eight steps listed above happen automatically, without the need for manual sales team intervention, thanks to Warmly’s deeply integrated architecture and automated sales orchestration.
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Making the most of your lead generation campaign with Warmly
Warmly, our signal-based revenue orchestration platform, is the perfect partner for your next lead gen campaign.
You can capture leads with our automated meeting booker, enrich account information with best-in-class data sources, and run AI-powered outreach sequences across a variety of channels.
It’s how companies like Namecoach turn traffic into revenue.
Get the case study: Discover how Namecoach booked 26 meetings in 6 months using Warmly.