Today, I'm going to share with you some insights into my company's structure and the business model chosen for it while also listing some key tools we used when launching lead generation processes. This scheme worked well even before the agency entered the markets of Western Europe and the USA, and later, with minor adjustments taking into account the peculiarities of doing business in a particular country, it turned out to be effective everywhere.

Just as the Earth, in the view of the ancients, stands on three pillars – the success of my agency, engaged in business process outsourcing, is based on the coordinated work of three departments that ensure productive interaction with clients: External, Internal and Research.

Their responsibilities include:

• Email copywriters creates sales text templates for mailings that can generate orders;
• Account managers ensure that clients who are already interested in cooperation with the agency remain loyal to us and strive to further develop partnerships;
• IT specialists prevent our mailings from going to spam;
• Managers whose responsibilities include providing personalized customer service, instilling trust in the brand in the subconscious of customers, and also ensure that clients who are already cooperating with the agency remain loyal to us and strive for further development of partnerships.

The indispensable center of the entire system are SDRs. They are in charge of the entire pool of clients, monitoring the results of the department’s actions, consultations and much more. It is these specialists who actively set up sales channels and provide further support, and in addition, they partially take on the functions of CSM, solving a variety of problems that inevitably arise in the process of interacting with clients, or providing answers to questions they have.

The duties of this department are to conduct cold calls and letters, attract new clients to the agency and organize hot sales appointments for higher-level managers. In general, this is an excellent school for working with leads, where newcomers often gain experience in the department and aspire to be SDRs in the future. However, talking about the Internal is such a broad topic that it can only be properly covered in a separate article.

The employees of this department have important tasks, including:

• Marketing analysis of industries of interest to the agency;
• Drawing up ICP – Ideal Client Profiles both for “internal” needs and for entrepreneurs who contact us;
• Searching for leads;
• Conducting subsequent assessment of the leads and dividing them into segments;
• Creating a base for b2b lead generation.

The activities of the first two departments are based on the information received from the Research's tasks mentioned above. Therefore, it is fair to say: if SDRs serve as the defining link in the External, then Research employees are the core of the entire team.

This is the client’s name, the name of his company, position, email, as well as any data that allows you to put forward a personalized offer that has a high chance of interest to that person.

Information about the client’s company is also important: number of employees, their hiring activities, technology stack (software for IT projects with programming languages and a range of frameworks), level of traffic to the company’s website and the company’s annual income.

First of all, we compile a database about the client with the most detailed consideration of needs, outline clear contours of the target audience of his company, indicating its “pain points” and delete all insignificant information. Without this, it is impossible to create a business proposal that is guaranteed to “hook” the entrepreneur.

Collecting data could have taken much more time and missed important information if we had not used the cloud-based Trello program for it and the Typeform online tool, which allows us to create flexible forms for various types of surveys: whether we are talking about an accounting outsource, a remote call center, or for other business processes, and can always be customized as needed. The client simply needs to fill them out, after which the form will immediately be sent to specialists from Research for processing, and after a few days, the information will be entered into the database.

At this stage, we research the niche that the client is interested in and compile a list of companies that fit the ICP parameters. The number and volume of sources may vary, but the more there are, the better the result will be.

I personally recommend the following list, without which I cannot imagine either a high-quality search for hot warm cold leads or, in principle, the activities of my agency:

• AngelList – website with information about startups and investors.
• BuiltWith – a platform containing information about technology stacks, engines and extensions used by websites.
• Capterra.com – an online service with analytical articles and reviews of software manufacturers’ products.
• Clutch.co – a wealth of information about companies, customer ratings, reviews from business partners and much more.
• Crunchbase – independent reviews from clients, buyers, investors.
• Google My Business – profiles of various small businesses in the United States.
• Datanyze – extension helps to find qualified b2b leads.
• G2.com – A business software product review site based on consumer reviews.
• LinkedIn – an excellent platform for outreach and a rich source of contact information for different companies.
• SimilarTech – suitable for obtaining data about web technologies and their further use in business development and client acquisition.
• Zoominfo – a commercial search engine that provides information about companies and individuals.

At this point, you should already have complete information about the company you are interested in and a list of business objects included in that company’s target audience. But so that all this does not go to waste, and the b2b sales lead generation brings its fruits, you need to send your proposal to the decision-maker – someone who will appreciate it and interest others in your idea.

Suppose you are not completely confident in the correctness of your conclusions about the structure of the company and the persons influencing its processes, in this case, you can:

• Outline the circle of employees among whom your decision-maker may be, and make the first test mailing.
• Additionally study the official website, paying special attention to the “About the Company” or “Team” pages.
• Revisit the sources above, especially LinkedIn, whose profiles are regularly updated with new information.

I consider LinkedIn an indispensable assistant for lead generation agency, but if it turns out to be an unsatisfactory source, since the platform has recently become increasingly focused on recruiting, it makes sense to turn to alternatives such as Xing, widely used in Germany, Switzerland and Austria (the so-called DACH region). Of course, a service with 15 million subscribers cannot compete with LinkedIn and its 500 million registered users, but if your area of interest lies in Europe, it may be useful. An argument in favor of Xing: there are 13 million European users on it, and 11 on LinkedIn.

Email marketing b2b lead generation is a universal and powerful tool for interacting with the target audience, but there are factors that can lead you to failure, despite painstaking preparation and in-depth study of information.

To avoid wasting time and energy, do two mandatory things:

• Make sure the company is active. If its website has not been updated for a long time, its blog displays materials posted two or three months ago, and the social networks of management members remain silent, there is a high chance that your letter will remain unanswered.
• Weed out companies with no growth. If the number of job positions in the company has not changed for the last 2-3 years, the hiring schedule looks sluggish, profits have stagnated, then it is unlikely that your cooperation, even if it takes place, will bring impressive profits.

This is another reason to turn to LinkedIn for help, or rather, LinkedIn Insights. In addition, if you belong to companies that outsource or outstaff, here you can see that the entity has recently, for example, significantly increased the number of vacancies for a position, and adjust your business application in accordance with the new information.

Every month, my agency deals with 50-60,000 contacts and cannot afford to buy ready-made and often ineffective databases or use inferior search engines.

We rely on:

• Hunter.io service, which helps to find entire samples of employee addresses by company domain and obtain information about what a particular person does for more successful outsourced email marketing.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator extension to manually search for addresses with access to your profile directly from your email. It is possible and even preferable to use the free version in the early stages, but later, when you test it thoroughly, the paid version will allow you to go beyond your network and provide many other bonuses.
• Snov.io platform, which serves not only to search for e-mail, but also to set up trigger mailings, automatic e-mails sending and much more. There are many functions provided here to increase the efficiency of b2b sales lead generation.
• Automated parsing tools such as Dux-Soup, Google Spreadsheets, Phantomuster to search for Gmail addresses associated with Twitter and Facebook page addresses;
• Extensions for single requests when you know the name of the person you need and his email service (for example, Gmail and Outlook). LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Name2Email are good examples here.

Now that all the preparatory work has been done, the decision-maker has been identified, the address database has been selected, you can start setting up the mailing list. I highly recommend using Reply for this purpose; this service greatly simplifies inbox management, helps sort clients by potential and automates mailings.

So, you will be able to successfully achieve:

• High-quality B2B email database;
• Well-configured mailboxes;
• Personalized templates that will create the illusion of a “living letter” for the recipients;
• Offer that takes into account the needs of the client.

These are the points on which you should never spare time and effort, because they always pay off in the field of b2b sales lead generation using electronic mailings, while negligence and mistakes can derail almost guaranteed success. Naturally, you will have to control the interface of your email service so that missing encodings do not spoil your performance.

Finally, you need to take into account the conditions of the mail provider, clean up the content from spam triggers, send the number of letters allowed by the rules per day from each individual mailbox, and observe the intervals between sending them. For example, in our country it is 110 seconds and above. Agree, it’s a shame to go through such a difficult path and end up in spam at the last step!