Trends You Can’t Ignore in Q3 and Heading into Q4 for Lead Gen Brands

As we enter Q3 and the second half of the year, the landscape is even more competitive online for lead generation brands. Traditional sales prospecting methods, like cold calling, are more challenging than ever as it’s increasingly more difficult to reach your target buyer and key decision maker within an organization.

Given these obstacles, I’ve implemented three fresh and cutting-edge strategies for Power Digital to take our own lead generation efforts to the next level. My hope is that you can learn from my experience and incorporate these impactful strategies into your customer acquisition and lead generation efforts, immediately.

1) Know your Audience on a Deeper Level

The battle for fresh leads and new customers is more fierce than ever, so truly knowing who your target customer is and what makes them tick is a critical component to overall success.

Sure, you have a rough idea of who your ideal customers are, but do your marketing and lead generation efforts effectively speak to their motivators and pain points?

Also, are these rough ideas of your customers solely based on your assumptions or have you validated this?

To drill down into your audience and get to know them at a deeper level, I recommend implementing a Customer Insights process, where you gather information through surveying your current customers in order to better serve them and successfully reach fresh leads. Through this process, you will gain a clear understanding of their motivators during the buying process, the pain that essentially led them to look for a solution like yours and more. Long story short, Customer Insights help you hunt rather than fish and be extremely intentional with your marketing initiatives.

Not only does Customer Insights make your marketing initiatives much more efficient, but it arms your sales team with the information they need to close more deals. Based off a few key segmentation details captured from your marketing form fills, they’ll quickly know which customer persona they’re talking to, what their main motivators are and how to quickly establish authority with them.

Gone are the days of standard cold calls. Now, the customer expects you understand them before the first conversation and personalize your messaging and offer accordingly.

2) Leverage Outbound Email

Outbound email as a sales prospecting tactic has proven to be a huge winner for our lead generation efforts at Power Digital. Instead of traditional cold-calling, we utilize hand-crafted 1:1 email marketing to our ideal clients to book discovery meetings and bring in leads for our sales team.

This strategy is far more scalable than traditional cold calling, going door to door, or attending trade shows because you can hit mass amounts of prospects with a very custom-tailored message. As a business owner, we all know that our sales team’s time is best spent communicating with warm leads, instead of trying to drum up leads out of thin air.

Outbound email helps do just that and lets your sales team focus on closing! Thanks to the key findings from Customer Insights discussed above, Outbound email hits the inbox of the key decision makers in your industry. You’ll no longer waste your time and resources chatting with hundreds of people to finally get to the one you were looking for.

We’ve developed a formula where we combine high segmentation and winning sales tactics to tell a story, which has proven this outbound formula to work really well.

3) Provide Huge Value in Advance

This is a lesson that we have continued to learn within our own business as well as with our clients’ businesses in the lead gen space.

There is a ton of noise online and people are very skeptical to invest their time now more than ever, so booking a demo or a call is a big ask if you’re targeting the C Suite, which is the goal in outbound email to get to the right person the first time.

The key to overcoming this is to give your C Suite contact incredible value upfront in a short and digestible format.

You can think of it similar to a lead magnet where you’re trying to acquire leads or new customers and have a simple email ask that comes with a downloadable or white paper that is easy to digest and can be consumed in only a few minutes, while providing incredible value.

This can be difficult but a lot of times the answer is hidden in plain sight because you are doing this already in your sales cycle. During our sales cycle at Power Digital, for example, we give every sales lead an extremely comprehensive audit of their website and digital marketing efforts so they get a huge amount of value from us before engaging. The challenge is that we need to find out how to pull that value up to the front and make as digestible and impactful as possible from the start before they commit to an hour to get on the phone.

Stay Focused

If you can stay laser-focused on fully understanding your audience, pushing sales through outbound email, and providing digestible value upfront, you will be set up for success through the end of the year.

Q3 paves the way for a successful Q4, and Q4 is arguably the most important quarter for most businesses as it sets the tone for the following year.

To execute on these things, be sure to have dedicated people who are taking ownership, with clear and SMART goals that are shared, agreed upon, and actually feasible. This way one person is not responsible for these three critical components to success. Ownership is going to be your key to success during the busiest time of the year.