The General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679(GDPR) is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals citizens of the European Union(EU) and the European Economic Area(EEA). The GDPR aims primarily to give control to individuals over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business.

How does GDPR impact B2B email marketing?

After the introduction of GDPR, Companies can no more bombard the inboxes of prospects anymore. One needs permission to even a send an e-mail to a potential customer. This has gravely impacted the landscape of e-mail marketing. But the good news is there are solutions to tackle this mammoth challenge.

Let’s have a look at few of the solutions:–

Increase your pool of prospect– Earlier, marketers used to run opt-in email campaigns to all the contacts in their database that resided in the EU. Generally, the success rate of opt-in campaigns used to be 10 to 50%, which meant the pool of EU prospects in your database would probably be reduced to 50-90%. Now, GDPR has made this a little trickier. E-mails cannot be sent without taking the permission of the recipients. So the list of net recipients drastically reduces down. So, the solution here lies in building a database of prospects.

Regular Data Cleansing – It is a known fact that data becomes stale in no time. People changes jobs with time and their contact details such as e-mail IDs no longer remain active. You may not have a successful opt-in campaign if your emails hit a dead inbox. By cleansing your database, you can merge and remove duplicates, fill in the missing information and increase the odds of securing consents from your EU prospects.

Personalisation of Data – We all are aware that B2B marketing is all about personalisation and the introduction of GDPR has strengthened this fact even more. Successful personalisation of Opt In campaigns begins with data, the more we know about a prospect the easier it is to segment our data, by segmenting the audience, it is more likely to get consent. Personalisation of data helps even more in calling campaigns. The impact is visible right in the first few seconds of the call itself and finally helps in getting the consent.

For successful GDPR compliant campaigns, partnering with an expert makes complete sense. At KIA Biz, we help out in carrying out Opt In campaigns across the globe including Europe. Our expertise includes all kinds of Data Quality Solutions such as B2B list building, b2B data cleansing and data verification services. In line with our value for being unique, we have a large team to make calls for opt ins. So, before your next GDPR compliant Opt In campaign, do contact us at info@kiabiz.com

Sales is the pillar of any organization because it is the one which brings revenue. But in today’s competitive world, sales process is becoming tougher with each passing day. Then, how can one make the sales process more effective? Here are some tips to solve this problem.

Make Your Sales Strategy More Targeted

Define your sales strategy. Before you even start the process of sales, what’s most important is to define your sales strategy and make it more targeted. Decide your target segments. These segments could be based on geography, type of company, its size and most important of all if they need your product or service. Later on, based on analysis, changes can be made but this gives direction to entire sales process.

Your Lead Generation Strategy: A Blend of Inbound & Outbound

Next step is to decide upon which methods of lead generation you would like to use for your business. How would you like to approach your potential customers? In today’s era, the best strategy would be to opt for a blend of both inbound and outbound methods.

Tips for Your Inbound Lead Generation Strategy

For your inbound lead generation, ensure strong presence on various search engines such as Google, Bing, yahoo etc. This is time consuming activity but it does give results in the long run. Your digital presence will also help in building your brand. The stronger is your SEO, the higher the possibility of prospects coming to your website. You can also choose methods such as affiliate marketing.

Ensure your strong presence on social media platforms. Choose the platform as per your business. For example, if you are in B2B business then Linkedin as a platform will be your bet. On the other hand, if you are in B2C business, the Facebook as a platform is more suited to you.

Tips for Your Outbound Lead Generation Strategy

Once you have identified the segments, identify the organization that you would like to target. Narrow down the process further with identifying the right person who could be your target prospect. This is called List Building or Contact Discovery. The key here is to understand who would be user of your product or service. The decision maker could be different but it is not always recommended to approach the decision maker directly. You can target people at the middle level of the organization and then they can recommend you to the decision maker.

B2B Lead Generation through E-mail Marketing & Targeted Cold Calling

Once your list of target prospects is ready, you can either send them e-mails. Keep in mind the regulations of the geography you are targeting. For example, if you are targeting countries in EU region, you have to abide by GDPR rules. Make sure you take permission from the recipients first before you send them e-mails.

You can also target all these target companies by calling them up and sharing information about your services and products.

How KIA Biz can help

KIA Biz offers highly targeted B2B list building services. We specialize in contact discovery services for target segments located across the globe, no matter how difficult the geography is. In the next step, we also help our clients with lead generation and B2B appointment setting. Thus, we take maximum load off the sales team and they can focus on closures. So if you would need any help with B2B contact discovery, lead generation and appointment setting, do write to us at info@kiabiz.com

In this interesting age of digitization, technology is transforming a lot of things in the business world. Technology itself is also constantly transforming, and this has resulted in new marketing techniques and methodologies, such as content marketing, social media marketing etc. Despite that fact, one of the most valuable marketing techniques for b2b lead generation is still Telemarketing since.

Telemarketing and its Evolution

It was in 1970s when telemarketing emerged as a technique of marketing. Ever since then, it has seen immense changes. Telemarketing saw it’s haydays in 1990s. In those days, voice mails were not so common and buyers had more receptivity for listening to tele-callers, The ‘Call to Connect’ ratio was as high as 20%. But in the last decade, with the prevalence of digital platforms, telecalling has lost it’s relevance to a certain extent. Buyers are now skeptical towards sales calls. Also, the Call to Connect ratio has dropped down. But despite these facts, tele marketing remains an important technique in lead generation.

Why add Telemarketing to your Marketing Mix?

• The Human Touch

Through telemarketing, organizations can still add the human touch to the sales process. This always helps in building long term relationship with the customers.

• Better Sales Intelligence 

Through telemarketing, it is easier to build a connection with the client. Thus, telemarketers can ask   relevant questions and gather intelligent data from potential customers. This data proves to be very useful in creating personalized marketing messaging for each prospect.

• Flexibility

Unlike, many other marketing techniques, telemarketing is very flexible. Instant tweaks can be made in each call as per the potential customer.

How to make Telemarketing More Effective?

In today’s era, telemarketing can still be used but it has to be made more effective.

• Better quality data of potential customers

For any organization, it is of utmost importance to understand their target segment for their product or service. This involves building an accurate list. Especially now, with the decline in the willingness of customers to listen and involvement of multiple stakeholders in decision making, making the call to the right person is more important.

At KIA Biz, we understand the relevance of correct data in telemarketing. We help out all our customers with building highly accurate marketing data based on job titles, geographies, industries etc.

• Understanding Geographies and market segment 

Changes need to be made in the marketing mix as per the geography being targeted. In certain geographies, telemarketing still remains some of the best techniques of generating leads. In these geographies, more effort needs to be concentrate on calling the prospect rather than using digital platforms.

At KIA Biz, we help our clients from across the globe to generate better quality leads by calling their prospects. Equipped with better quality data, our teams generate leads in much lesser time, thus, reducing the length of sales cycle and the costs involved.

For highly accurate list building and lead generation services, send us an e-mail at info@kiabiz.com.

Marketing campaigns are always a cost and it is very curtail that they yield relevant results. It gets awfully frustrating when a marketing campaign fails Sometimes, the e-mails bounce back. Other times, e-mails do not reach the right person. Ineffectiveness of a marketing campaign is quite a common phenomenon. So, how do we increase the effectiveness of a marketing campaign? The solution lies in high quality data. A campaign can never be successful if it is carried out using bad quality data.

When we try to measure our awareness metrics, we usually opt to rely on the number of followers we have on social media platforms or how many visits our websites have in a day. But the truth is that this information alone is not completely reliable.

Why do we need high quality data?

When it comes to meeting business objectives, wherein generating leads and in turn generating revenues are the goals, the  marketing data required has to be more precise and of higher quality. High quality data ensures better conversion of leads into sales. With the right data, you can focus your efforts on better b2b demand generation , lead generation and finally closures.

Website Analytics and List Building

Through website analytics can always help in defining better marketing strategies. It can help in understanding from which regions more traffic is landing on the website. These regions can be the key markets for you.

 Further to this analytics, list building can enhance the marketing efforts. Lists of prospects from these areas can be made and targeted for the next marketing campaigns.

Better lists, better leads 

Acquiring a list of prospects once and working on that list constantly campaign after campaign may not be effective. Data becomes stale in no time especially now when people change jobs more frequently than ever. Thus, data needs to be cleansed in regular intervals of time. In fact, it is always a good idea to cleanse the data before every marketing campaign.

How we can help?

At KIA Biz, we help organizations build high quality data lists. With our B2B list building services and data cleansing services, we help marketing teams to carry out highly effective marketing campaigns. We thoroughly understand each project and carry out customized contact discovery efforts. We ensure each project Is delivered well with the timelines defined.

So, before your next marketing campaign, do try our B2B list building and data cleansing services. Write to us at info@kiabiz.com

Generating qualified leads is a huge challenge in B2B tech marketing. Leads are often the most important metric to your sales and executive teams and the anchor to an effective B2B marketing strategy. But how do you know if you should focus on demand generation or lead generation?  Do you have clarity on what is the difference between the two? You can’t generate leads if you’re not also generating demand and you lose a lot value if you do not convert the demand into leads.

What’s the difference Between B2B Lead Generation and B2B Demand Generation?

Demand generation includes all your efforts in generating interest for your product or service. On the other hand, lead generation describes your specific process for collecting information about contacts to pass along to sales.  Demand gen may include raising awareness of your product features or how your services can add value to a prospect’s business It focuses on overall brand awareness and is designed to reach a wide audience that may or may not include potential customers.

Lead generation converts the interest generated by all these activities into something tangible and actionable. If you gate your content behind a form asking for contact details, that’s demand generation. Here, the objective of demand generation is to capture contact details from as many people so that the sales team can call them and can convert the demand into qualified leads.

What are the ways by which you can generate demand?

• Blog posts or articles
• YouTube videos
• Social media posts
• Podcasts and interviews
• Press releases
• Free tools
• Case studies
• Lists 

Which methods can be used for B2B Lead Generation?

• Free samples
• Email Subscriptions
• Events
• Product Demos

How we add value?

At KIA Biz, we help our clients with both demand generation and lead generation. The process of demand generation begins with high quality lists of prospects. We cater to clients across the globe in identifying the right prospects.  Our team of expert researchers builds highly accurate lists from all geographies including continents such as Africa and South America where in contact discovery is extremely difficult. Once the lists are ready, for Event Companies, we generate leads with our ‘Opt In’ service. Our team of callers helps in event registration by calling each potential attendee.

Technology companies often use white papers for lead generation. For our Tech clients, our team of callers calls the lists of prospects and generates interest in e-mail subscriptions for white papers, newsletters.

For high quality effective B2B Demand Generation and B2B Lead Generation services, please write to us at info@kiabiz.com

There are various reasons why a company chooses to participate in a B2B event. These are great platforms to network with potential customers. A small company may want the exposure that a live webinar can provide, while a large company may need the face-to-face interaction that a trade show offers. Before the event is held, event organizers will most probably provide you with past attendee list. This list gives an idea about what kind of people may visit your booth during the event.

What are the challenges in using the attendee list?

Some event organizers provide partial details of people who have confirmed their participation. But most of the times you will find: The attendee data is devoid of contact details: without email id, phone number and even physical address. So, carrying out marketing campaign becomes a challenge with only company names, job titles

Data in unsuitable formats: Most likely, your team uses a CRM and the data you put into these systems have to be in a particular format. Unfortunately, there is a high possibility that event contact data format varies with each organizer. Hence, managing campaigns through a centralized system becomes very difficult.

Data without comprehensive company information: Lack of accurate data prevent event marketers to categorize and qualify the best target audience for a certain event related networking and appointment setting. Prior qualification of prospect’s data always helps in serving the prospects better.

In today’s fast pace and ever changing world, data becomes stale in no time. In USA alone, that 30 million out of 138 million employed people in US switch jobs every year. Thus, it is clear that data cleansing is to be carried out regularly.

Why hire an expert for Data Append and Data Verification?

Often times, the attendee information provided is not always 100% accurate, so sometimes you may not be able to make the best use of the list. B2B Data append is a very time consuming task. Does your team have that kind of time in hand before an event to enhance the list? Thus, it always makes sense to hire a data research company to take care of data append.

At KIA Biz, we have years of thorough experience providing services such as list building, data append and data verification. Our team of experts uses various advanced tools to create highly accurate databases especially targeted for various B2B events and trade shows. We provide high quality data in least possible time. Before your next upcoming event, do connect with us at info@kiabiz.com to enhance your list of attendees and make the best of your event.

Sales qualified lead (SQL) is a prospective customer that has been researched and vetted – first by an organization’s marketing department and then by its sales team – and is ready for the next stage in the sales process. For an SQL already has intent to buy company’s products or services and has met an organization’s lead qualification criteria. The lead has now crossed the engagement stage and is now ready to be pursued for conversion into a full-fledged customer.

What constitutes an SQL varies from company to company. Marketing and sales team sometimes don’t agree on how to qualify leads. Marketing team often identifies these leads in the beginning of the sales process where the main objective is to foster interest in the prospect. These leads are then shared with the sales team for persuading further and turning them into closures. MQL refers to a lead wherein a prospect has interest. This is tracked from looking at specific behaviors or level of engagement, such as website visits and content offer downloads. Ideally, only certain forms should trigger a lead to the MQL stage, such as direct business offers and other sales-ready CTAs.

Sales Qualified Lead is the next stage. This means that the sales team has qualified this lead as a potential customer. The SQL is in the buying cycle, while the MQL is not ready for that buying stage just yet. Once you know what differentiates the two, you can practice lead scoring, for instance giving higher lead scores to those who visited high-value pages (sales guides), filled out high-value forms (direct sales demo requests) or viewed your site multiple times.

One of the important factors to be considered in SQL is demographics. Keen attention is to be paid towards customer profiling. Information such as a lead’s industry, company size and job role are critical in determining how interested and serious they are in purchasing company’s products. Other information such as pain points and budget are also to be shared with sales department in order to shorten the sales cycle.

At KIA Biz, we help our clients in SQL generation. We first understand their target segment thoroughly. We build lists based on the specifications of the clients and then proceed to lead generation and appointment setting. These leads are highly qualified and hence, the chances of closures are higher. For lead generation and appointment setting services, do get in touch with us via email at info@kiabiz.com

What is Demand Generation?

Demand Generation, or “demand gen”, is the process of creating awareness and demand for your company’s product or service. In short, demand gen aims to bring new visitors to your website or business in order to introduce them to your company. The end result is to build awareness in your target audience, establish trust, and to create interest for your company. What are the techniques of demand generation?

Blog posts or articles
Social media posts
YouTube videos
Press releases
Podcasts and interviews
Free tools
Case studies

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation or “lead gen”, is the process of converting potential customers into qualified leads. It is the process in which a potential customer exchanges his information in exchange with something such as an eBook, white paper etc.

It is way below demand generation in the sales funnel.

The end result is to find qualified leads for your company so that they then be added to a lead nurturing processor so that a salesperson can follow up.

How are leads generated?

Any type of gated content (such as an eBook, PDF, checklist, cheat sheet, whitepaper, etc.)
Free samples
Email Subscriptions
Events
Product Demos

Viral Contests (where someone needs to enter their email or other contact information to enter)

What’s the Difference Between Lead Generation and Demand Generation?

Demand Gen and lead gen are not the same but they are not very different either. In a nutshell, lead generation is a subset of demand generation. Demand generation is used to create awareness and attract new people to your business, while lead generation is used to qualify those people into “leads” and get them ready for the next step in your marketing or sales process.

Demand generation uses free content (such as blog posts, articles, videos, etc.) in order to create awareness and to attract your target audience.

Lead generation content is “gated”, that means a person has to provide their email and/or other contact information in order to receive that piece of content (such as a PDF, whitepaper, checklist, etc.). This allows sales and marketing to continue the relationship and nudge that person towards a purchase.

For lead and demand generation services, please send us an email at info@kiabiz.com

Product designers understood long ago that they’d save money as well as time if they consulted with their colleagues in manufacturing rather than just throwing new designs over the wall. The two functions figured out it wasn’t enough to just coexist but if they could work together to create value for their organization and for their customers. One would think that marketing and sales teams, whose work is also interconnected, would have discovered something like this too. As a rule, though, they’re separate functions within an organization, and, when they do work together, they don’t always get along. When sales are disappointing, Marketing often blames the sales force for its poor execution of an otherwise brilliant rollout plan. The sales team, in turn, claims that Marketing team sets prices extremely high and uses too much of the budget, which instead should go toward hiring more salespeople or paying the sales reps higher commissions. More broadly, sales departments tend to believe that marketers are out of touch with what’s really going on with customers. Marketing believes the sales force is short sighted—they are too focused on individual customer experiences, unaware of the bigger market, and blind to the future. In short, each group often undervalues the other’s contributions.

Unfortunately, this lack of alignment ends up hurting an organization’s performance. Time and again, during research and consulting assignments, it is seen both groups stumble (and the organization suffer) because they were not willing to work together. Conversely, there is no question that, when Sales and Marketing work well together, companies see exponential improvement on all the important performance metrics: Sales cycles become shorter, market-entry costs reduce, and the cost of sales is lower.

It is clear that when sales and marketing teams work together, the advantages are too many.

Account based marketing is one such approach of the new marketing era wherein these two teams join hands work together for reaching the revenue goals of an organization. The boundaries between these two teams become blurred. Their relationship is redesigned to share structures, systems, and rewards. It’s a more strategic approach wherein the two teams together get involved in forward thinking tasks such as identifying new accounts. The two groups develop and implement shared metrics. Marketing’s role does not end at demand generation. They align with the sales team to generate leads which have much higher chance of closure. These amicable relations influence budgeting as well making it more flexible and less contentious. The joint effort reduces the sales cycle drastically.

In a nutshell, to survive amidst fierce competition account based marketing is the best approach to target large accounts. At KIA Biz, we help our clients with account based marketing. With highly targeted contact discovery efforts we identify the right stakeholders in large organizations, help in creating personalized messaging for them and then generate leads for them. For Contact discovery, lead generation and account based marketing, do write to us at info@kiabiz.com

Recognizing a genuine sales opportunity can directly impact your sales results. Bandwidth is constrained, time is short, and targets are high. This is why talking to anyone other than a highly-qualified lead is a waste of valuable time. So the easiest way to make the sales team start using their time more efficiently is by staying focused on qualified leads.

A Sales qualified lead (SQL) is a prospective customer that is considered eligible for moving to the next step in the sales process. A sales-qualified lead would have demonstrated an intent to buy your company’s product/service and met your company’s criteria of lead qualification that defines whether the prospect is a potential buyer. Usually, this category is restricted to a prospect that has crossed the engagement stage and needs to be pursued for conversion into a customer. So, these are the folks you should be talking to! But is that what happens?

Unfortunately, no! A study conducted by Marketing Sherpa revealed that 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to their Sales team; however, only 27% of those leads are qualified.

Not understanding what is a qualified sales lead looks like could be a major challenge. So, let’s take a look at the necessary traits of a sales qualified lead.

An Identified Need

For a prospect to be a qualified lead, they should be first aware of their need. A real prospect will know they have a problem and should be invested in finding a solution for it. Your inside sales team or even your marketing communications should use the right questions to help drive the realization whether the prospect is aware of their need. The actions and responses of the prospect could help drive the classification.

A different priority can be assigned to various prospect actions, such as responses to marketing materials or activity on the website. Depending on these actions you can create a lead-scoring process. For example, repeat visitors should be prioritized over a first-time visitor, and specific activities, such as downloading a case study or filling out an inquiry form should give the lead a higher score. This will help your team distinguish between someone who was merely kicking tires and a prospect who is earnest about buying.

Authority to Make Decisions

It may not be fruitful to spend time and effort on a contact who does not have the authority to make a purchasing decision. The title, role in the organization, or job descriptions on their LinkedIn profile can help your marketing or inside sales team promptly ascertain if the person they are considering is a decision maker and is in a position to buy.

Financial Ability to Buy

A prospect’s financial ability to buy your product/service plays a huge role in determining whether or not they are a sales qualified lead and are worth pursuing. This usually means that they have a sense of a ballpark budget at some point in time in the process. Knowing precise numbers isn’t necessary as long as you ascertain the fact that your product/service’s price and the prospect’s ability to pay are within the same range. This is why the websites carry price indicators or bundled options. Your inside sales team could ascertain if the prospect already has a competitive solution and this helps establish a benchmark of how much they are used to spending. And in case, they don’t have a solution yet; you could look at the kind of issues they are looking to address and the financial impact of not addressing those. That helps drive a pretty fair sense of the amount of money they would be willing to spend to fix the issue.

An Urgent Requirement

Timing is everything in sales. The sales team is under constant pressure to meet their targets, which is why they need to know whether or not a prospect is in a hurry to make a decision. These are the people who need maximum TLC. Your inside sales folks responsible for appointment setting should ask the right questions to find out if a prospect has a fixed timeline to make a decision. Another way to look at the probability of the decision being made sooner rather than later is probing to identify if there is a compelling event that could drive closure? Is there a product launch lined up during an industry event? Is there some economic or public occasion that links up to their business? This is important because if the prospect is aware of the problem and has a clear-cut need but for some reason does not have clarity on the timing, your sales approach would be different. You can get your team to nurture them until the time is right and set up meetings for a future date.

While determining a threshold is an obvious move, a survey revealed that 71% of B2B marketers do not have a lead scoring mechanism. And out of those that do have a lead score threshold, 65% do not nurture their leads. Isn’t it surprising?

When the sales leads are qualified better, they can be addressed strategically. This is when they produce phenomenal results. This is a win-win -your customers are satisfied because they feel like you understand their needs, your marketing team feels appreciated and motivated, and the sales team feels successful because they can apply the right approach to close the deal.