INTERNATIONAL INBOUND LEAD GENERATION The 10-step process for becoming a thought leader within your subject matter domain and how to use this position to drive quality traffic from all over the world to your web site. by Hans Peter Bech
International Inbound Lead Generation
© Hans Peter Bech, May 2022
First edition Unless otherwise indicated, Hans Peter Bech copyrights all materials on these pages. All rights reserved. No part of these pages, either text or images may be used for any purpose other than personal use. Therefore, reproduction, modification, storage in a retrieval system or retransmission, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, for reasons other than personal use, is strictly prohibited without prior written permission. The business model framework is distributed under a Creative Commons license from Strategyzer AG and can be used without any restrictions for modelling businesses. Published by TBK Publishing® (a division of TBK Consult ApS), CVR: DK27402917 www.tbkconsult.com/publishing ISBN: 978-87-93116-55-9 TBK-WIPA-037
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Table of contents: TARGET AUDIENCE
............................................................................................ 4
ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................... 4 TOP-OF-FUNNEL LEAD GENERATION IS THE HOLY GRAIL .............. 5 A TITLE AWARDED BY YOUR READERS .......................................................... 6 THE TWO MAIN APPROACHES
.................................................................. 7
1.
SELECT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE ..................................................... 9
2.
LEARN HOW YOUR CUSTOMERS BUY .............................................. 10
3.
CREATE QUALITY CONTENT .................................................................. 11
4.
BUILD A BLOG
5.
ENRICH YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE ..................................................... 14
6.
POST AND ENGAGE REGULARLY
7.
FOLLOW YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS ....................................... 17
8.
INCREASE YOUR 1ST LEVEL NETWORK
9.
INTERACT ........................................................................................................ 19
10.
TAKING THE CONVERSATION OFFLINE
........................................................................................... 13 .................................................... 15 ....................................... 18 ...................................... 20
ORGANIZATIONAL REQUIREMENTS ............................................................... 21 CONTENT PRODUCTION OR CREATION. POSTING AND ENGAGING
.......................................................................................... 21
............................................................................................................................. 21
LANGUAGES AND LOCAL ENVIRONMENTS
...................................... 22
TIME TO IMPLEMENT
.......................................................................................... 22
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
.......................................................................................... 23
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International Inbound Lead Generation
Target audience The target audience for this whitepaper is anyone who works with revenue generation in the software industry.
Abstract This e-book is about top of funnel international lead generation for B2B software with long sales cycles when you do not have a big budget. It explains how you can design, implement, and operate an organic thought leadership program that enables potential customers to find and engage with you. The program will also help you move traffic through the funnel, but the prime objective of this e-book is to discuss how it can generate awareness and interest at the top.
Author Hans Peter Bech, M.Sc. (econ.)
Acknowledgements The e-Book is based on content originally published as a webinar organised and produced by YASAD, the non-governmental organization representing the software sector in Turkey. Thank you to Gönül Kamali for hosting and producing the webinar and to Burak Neslitürk from Qualified ONE for the moderation. The proof reading has been performed by Emma Crabtree, ecr@tbkconsult.com. Illustrations, design and lay-out comes from the hands of Jelena Galkina, info@kompot.ee
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International Inbound Lead Generation
Top-of-funnel lead generation is the holy grail If you do not fill the funnel at the top, then nothing comes out at the bottom. That is stating the obvious, but it does explain why so many business software companies have a hard time delivering on their budgets not to speak about fulfilling their potential and ambitions. How do you generate an increasing number of leads when you do not have access to a big budget? And how do you generate leads from foreign markets? Leads that can become customers and then make the basis for setting up permanent international operations. These are the key questions when your product has international potential, the potential customers are unaware of your existence, and they don’t buy your type of product very often. The core of the challenge is that you must develop awareness and build a relationship before they will consider you a viable vendor. As the buyer’s journey may take years, you must be persistent, patient and economise your funds. This e-book will give you the recipe for how you can organise and execute a lead generation program that doesn’t require a big budget.
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A title awarded by your readers The 10-step shoestring approach is based on a simple principle: What you have in abundance, what is in high demand, and which is unrelated to your limited budget is your insight.
Industry Challenges
You know and understand the issues, problems, challenges, and opportunities that your customers have within the domain where you operate. You know the difficulties they face with managing the change from their current modus operandi to a situation based on your category of software. You understand the value that your type of solution can release and how to make it happen. That insight is something your potential customers all over the world would like to learn from if only they knew you existed and if you shared your wisdom in a non-propaganda and product-agnostic type format. I admit that the term thought leadership is misused. Doing a simple search on LinkedIn returns over 100,000 people in my immediate network (1st, 2nd and 3rd level) that use the term thought leader to describe themselves. A quick look reveals that most of them don’t share any leading thoughts on their LinkedIn profiles or anywhere else for that matter. They claim to be thought leaders, but it doesn’t show. If you follow my advice, then you do not need to self-inflate. Instead, you establish a schedule for researching, thinking, documenting, and sharing your thoughts and insight generously. The key objective is to make others consider you a thought leader or a trustworthy industry authority, and that doesn’t require any self-inflation. Rather the opposite.
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The two main approaches THERE ARE TWO MAIN APPROACHES FOR GENERATING LEADS: 1. YOU FIND THEM 2. THEY FIND YOU
This e-book explains how you design, implement, and operate a program that enables potential customers to find and engage with to you. It’s a category 2 approach. It will make them find you. The program will also help you move traffic through the funnel, but the prime objective of this e-book is to explain how it can generate awareness and interest at the top. I have divided the program into ten steps so that they can be implemented chronologically.
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THE STEPS ARE: 1.
SELECT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
2. LEARN HOW YOUR CUSTOMERS BUY 3. CREATE QUALITY CONTENT
(THAT IS PRODUCT AND COMPANY AGNOSTIC)
4. BUILD A BLOG 5. REVISE AND ENRICH YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE 6. POST AND ENGAGE REGULARLY 7. FOLLOW YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS 8. INCREASE YOUR 1ST LEVEL NETWORK 9. INTERACT WITH YOUR NETWORK 10. TAKE THE CONVERSATIONS OFFLINE
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1.
Select your target audience
The first step is selecting your target audience. We can also call it identifying your ideal customer profile. This step is an integrated part of defining your business model, so you probably already have a good idea about what your ideal customer or customers look like. In general, I can recommend that you have your business model well described before you start on the 10-step process. You will come to reuse all the elements from your business model in the process I propose. What you need to do in step 1 is map the characteristics of your ideal customers to the search criteria in LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator. Yes, you need to subscribe to LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator. Without Sales Navigator my 10step approach will not work. Please let me stress, that I am not paid to promote LinkedIn, but when you have a B2B product then Sales Navigator is a must if you want to use my lead generation method or any other lead generation method for that matter. There are various versions of Sales Navigator and if you don’t use it already, then I suggest you start with the CORE version. The subscription price is currently around $1,000 per year per user. We use it at TBK Consult and are happy to pay this price. The revenue we generate through LinkedIn more than justifies the cost. With LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator you can find companies that match your ideal customer profile criteria. And you can find the people within those companies with whom you would like to communicate now and in the future.
IN SHORT: Step one is getting access to LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator service and use this service to find your ideal potential customers.
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2. Learn how your customers buy Your potential customers most likely don’t buy your type of product the same way, but still, there are some processes that are generic. The first process is what we call the buyer’s journey and a subsegment of that journey is the actual purchase process. Let me describe a sample buyer’s journey. This example illustrated below is from what we call a replacement market. It means that your solution replaces an existing solution that the potential customer currently uses. In this example the potential customer has a 10-year buying cycle. The actual purchase of a new solution and system takes place in the 10th year. The preparation of the actual purchase runs for one or two years prior to the year of the purchase. In the remaining seven years they may show interest in your type of product, but they will not consider or make a purchase. Your situation may be different. You may be in an addon market. That means that you complement something that the customer already has. In this case you may not have to wait 10 years before a customer is ready to buy. Or you may be in a newbiz market selling something nobody has. If nobody has it, then nobody knows about it either and that is altogether another challenge.
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What’s important here is to understand what type of information they need in each step of the buying journey eventually leading to a purchase. We want to offer information that creates Awareness, stimulates Interest, builds Desire, and supports Action. That’s the good old AIDA process and that still holds. The challenge we address in this e-book is that the effort of moving the potential customer from awareness to action may take several years.
IN SHORT: Step two is about understanding what type of information is required to support the AIDA process which includes the buyer’s journey and their final purchase process.
3. Create quality content Now comes the step where most companies struggle, and some fail completely. To make the 10-step method work you need to produce a steady stream of quality content, another word for information. You need to create and accumulate a repository of quality content in multiple formats. So, what do I mean by quality content? Most companies understand that they need to demonstrate or describe their products so customers will understand what they do. Therefore, companies produce product- and company-centric material. Such material is often full of self-praise. That’s why I also call it PROPAGANDA. Of course, you need to present your products and your company in a positive light. But to most people such information is useless. Why should I be interested in your product and company when I am not in a situation where I am preparing to purchase anything?
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Not in active buying mode
In active buying mode
THE TOTAL AVAILABLE MARKET
Therefore, smart companies also produce what I call INDUSTRY-CENTRIC CONTENT. That is content discussing the problems, challenges, and opportunities within your domain, that your customers are facing now, and in the future, including what to do about them at the general solution level. The benefit of industry-centric content is that it is relevant to all customers irrespective of where they are on their buying journey. At any point in time, the bulk of your potential customers are not in active buying mode, which means that your company and your product-centric content doesn’t attract their attention. Instead, they may consider it annoying propaganda. Achieving the status as an internationally recognised thought leader therefore requires that you produce a steady stream of industry-centric content.
You can package such content into blog posts or articles, videos, podcasts, white-papers, infographics, e-books, presentations, or some other searchable material that teaches the visitor something valuable in the cross-section of their problems and your area of expertise.
IN SHORT: You need to produce a steady stream of industry-centric content.
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4. Build a blog Where do you publish this content? The rule is: On your blog first. The blog should be a subdomain of your corporate website. Because the purpose of the 10-step method is to drive quality traffic to your website. You should therefore first and foremost post your content on your website. Having a blog as a separate subsegment of your website is an established and accepted format. It has another advantage too. Posting on your website gives you full control over the SEO - the search engine optimisation. You can use the same tools with which you’re already familiar for your website. If you don’t do SEO, then now is the time to start. The big difference between the blog and the rest of your web site is in the type of content posted. The blog should be product and company agnostic. It contains information from which any visitor can benefit without an urgent need for your product. Of course, you will twist the content to support your position and value propositions. Still, the blog is where you demonstrate your expertise, not where you directly praise and promote your company and your products. After posting on your own blog, you can then repost elsewhere. LinkedIn Publisher and Medium are good options for getting extended reach.
IN SHORT: You need to extend your corporate website with a blog.
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5. Enrich your LinkedIn profile Step 5 is about your personal LinkedIn profile and your LinkedIn company page. Before you start posting anything on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and before reaching out to potential customers, you should first revise and enrich your own personal profile and then your company’s page on LinkedIn. You see, most people fill their LinkedIn profiles with what they do for their employer. Stop that. Instead, you should describe what you do for your customers. That’s not so easy, and many fall back on generic platitudes such as “we are helping our customers improve their bottom line” or “we enable digital transformation”. That’s too fluffy. Everybody can claim that, and many also do. Instead, be factual, offer relevant metrics and impact on key performance indicators, and use some of the industry jargon that your customers can recognise. When you start using LinkedIn to build your network, then your job title should not look like a red warning light. Most of your potential customers are not in purchase mode, and even when they are then the last person in the universe that they want to connect or talk to on LinkedIn, or elsewhere for that matter, is a salesperson. Sales is something you do for your company, not for your customers. As you change your title to something more meaningful to the customer, you should also change your behaviour and stop pitching to anything with a pulse. Stop yelling and start listening. You should invest time and energy in understanding how LinkedIn works and the best resource that I have come across lately is Melonie Dodaro’s book LinkedIn Unlocked. So here comes a little promotion: Buy and read Melonie Dodaro’s book.
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Maybe you should also engage a LinkedIn coach that can help you get the full value out of the platform.
IN SHORT: Optimise you LinkedIn profile so it is valuable to your potential customers. If you don’t know how to do it, then read Melonie Dodaro’s book and engage a LinkedIn coach.
6. Post and engage regularly Now that you have valuable content to share and a LinkedIn customer-oriented profile the time has come to become active, to build awareness and attract attention. Allow me to repeat the warning! Do not spread noise and propaganda! Noise and propaganda account for over ninety per cent of the content on social media. LinkedIn is filled with nonsense and company- and product-centric material that doesn’t bring any business value to the reader. Companies announce that they have hired a new sales manager, have closed a funding round, are running a partner event, promote a newsletter, announce a free webinar, calling applications for a job or some other “look at me, I’m awesome” posts. Check your LinkedIn home feed, and you will find that most of the content is organic or paid-for noise and propaganda. Your strategy should not rely on noise and propaganda. Building a reputation as an international thought leader or an industry authority requires that you stop mistaking yelling for selling.
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Refrain from promoting your company and your products the same way most other companies and people do. Stop yelling that you have great products, healthy values, awesome people, lovely customers, brilliant business partners and generous investors. Instead, you should focus on discussing the problems and opportunities that your customers face. Unless what you do is relevant for hundreds of millions of people on LinkedIn, then you shouldn’t rely on showing up in their home feeds. You are competing with cat videos, celebrities, and self-appointed social media experts. You don’t stand a chance of getting the attention of your key audience this way. You should start posting regularly, say once or twice a day, but don’t expect to get many likes and comments. The key objective is to go for quality over quantity. There is no value in getting thousands of likes and comments if none of them are from your ideal customers. There are tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite that can help you schedule your posts. You should also use tagging. Tagging people will increase the relevant reach of your post but use it only when appropriate. By the way, you don’t always have to only post your own content. Posting content of other experts in your industry and tagging them will help build and promote your reputation and will create more invitations to connect. And finally: remember hashtags! If you don’t know what that is or how it works, then search the term and learn about it. Never post anything without a hashtag. Don’t overdo them. Two to three hashtags are ideal.
IN SHORT: Post and engage daily but stay clear of propaganda.
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7. Follow your potential customers When you have your content production and posting schedule up and running, and your profile reflects your industry authority, then it is time to start following some of the people and companies that you have found through your search using Sales Navigator. Not all of them will be active on LinkedIn, but some will be, and you can like, comment, and share their posts and articles. From time to time and when relevant, you can include a reference to content on the same subject that you or someone else has produced. I have a practical tip here: Use a mobile device (smartphone or tablet) to insert the reference link in the comment and watch what happens! Instead of just a text link, LinkedIn now generates a nice preview snippet of the post. Delete the text link, and the reference looks more like a signature element. Use this referral activity with care and stay relevant. You should add value to the discussion, not interrupt or derail it or worst of all, come across as spammy or salesy. As you increase your activities following other people, you will see an increase in invitations to connect. Although you are eager to expand your network, you should take a close look at each invitation and decide if it is relevant. There is no point in having a big network of people outside your target industry. If you choose to accept the invitation, then send them a welcome message. If you decline, then send them a friendly message urging them to follow you instead. Some of them will, and that will increase your number of followers without devaluing the quality of your 1st level network. You can use a tool such as TextExpander to have prepared messages, then it will only take a few seconds to respond.
IN SHORT: Follow your potential ideal customers and influencers and engage with those that are active on social media.
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8. Increase your 1st level network When you have been active for a few months enriching your profile, posting quality content, and enlarging your network, then comes the time where you can apply a very productive hack. There are tools available - robots - that can auto visit selected LinkedIn profiles. When you use such a service, then between ten and twenty per cent of those visited will look back at your profile. If you have a professional and compelling profile, then about five per cent will invite you to connect. Again, don’t just accept any invitation. Although the Sales Navigator is a powerful tool, the search results are based on profile data that people have filled in themselves. Only you or your assistant can decide if a person may be a relevant connection or not. Don’t rely on LinkedIn’s suggestions and recommendations. They are the result of automatic algorithms and are not very reliable. Spending time qualifying each new connection may not seem so important when you only have a few thousand connections. Still, as you approach the 30,000 limit, which is the maximum number of 1st level connections LinkedIn allows, then it does become an issue. With the hack I explain here, 30,000 connections are not an unrealistic target over two to three years depending on the size of your target audience. Using robots on LinkedIn is a violation of their terms and conditions, so be careful. A robot such as Dux-Soup is designed to mimic human behaviour, so LinkedIn doesn’t know of the violation. Dux-Soup only works with Sales Navigator, so LinkedIn is not policing the matter as strictly as if you used the free version.
IN SHORT: Use a robot to expand your 1st level network with quality connections.
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9. Interact With a growing network and a growing repository of quality content, you should keep the conversations going. Don’t waste time on your LinkedIn home feed. It’s where LinkedIn’s algorithms post messages from advertisers and other users. Based on what shows up in my home feed, LinkedIn is not doing a very good job, but you can judge for yourself. Instead, check your Sales Navigator and observe what your connections and leads are doing and interact directly with them. Keep in mind that although LinkedIn is the home of millions of professionals, not all of them are active. When you post something, only a tiny fraction of your network will see it. There are two reasons why.
The first reason is that they are not on LinkedIn around the time when you post. That happens often if you are in different time zones. A scheduling tool as Buffer or Hootsuite can help you overcome this issue.
The second reason is that LinkedIn deliberately exposes your post to only a fraction of your connections. I think it’s around 100. If the post doesn’t get any major engagements within the first couple of hours, then they will kill the visibility of your post. If you only have a small target group, say less than ten million individuals and you post about niche issues, then it is unlikely that you’ll get enough organic engagement for LinkedIn to boost it.
The smaller your market is, and the bigger the deals you do, the more personal and specific you should be in the content you share. Narrowing your focus on single companies is called Account-Based Marketing and Sales Navigator is an excellent tool to help you do this. You can pay LinkedIn to post your content in the feeds of a certain type of people within named companies. You can also find these individuals yourself and initiate contact and conversations. You can use robots to send personalised direct messages to your 1st level connections. However, only do so with messages that have genuine value to the recipient and don’t do it too often.
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You can also repost your content as articles on LinkedIn and win subscribers for a LinkedIn newsletter.
IN SHORT: Interact with your 1st level connections and use the LinkedIn hacks and robots available.
10. Taking the conversation offline If your revenue generation process requires you to have an individual conversation with your potential customers, then that relationship and conversation must go offline at some point. A first step in bringing a relationship offline could be to offer webinars. After the presentation or interview, then you open for the Q&A, or better, you can invite the participants to send their questions as PMs – personal messages. Again, I strongly recommend that you distinguish clearly between your product promotion and your thought leadership webinars. It is legitimate to offer product presentations and demonstrations, but don’t dress them up to be something else. There are times when people look for inspiration, and there are times when they search for solutions and products. Serve those two needs separately. To which extent you want to chase individual one-on-one calls depends on the situation and your value proposition. If you are successful in establishing yourself as an industry authority, then you will find that you begin to receive more incoming inquiries – we call those inbound leads - which is a good indicator that your method now works.
IN SHORT: Make yourself available for one-on-one conversations and start by offering webinars.
Never use direct messages for solicitations and don’t ask people you don’t know for favours. If you want someone to do something for you, then start by doing something for them first!!!
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Organisational requirements What kind of resources and organisation does the method require? Any company selling B2B software-based solutions need these functions to achieve predictable and scalable revenue generation processes.
THERE ARE TWO MAIN TYPES OF ACTIVITIES REQUIRED:
The activities related to lead generation will take place primarily in marketing, sales development, and sales.
1. DEVELOPING AND PRODUCING
Content production or creation
2. POSTING AND ENGAGING ON
You will need someone, internally or externally, that can plan and produce the content. This resource belongs in the marketing department. You can have several part-time people allocated, but in total I believe the minimum should be a budget for a full time equivalent. You will probably leave video and podcast productions to external parties, but with today’s technology you can easily do it all in-house.
Posting and engaging Posting and engaging should be done by the marketing department, by the sales development representatives and the account executives. You want the SDRs and AEs to own the relationships, so it makes sense that they drive the communication with the potential customers from a certain point. You need to agree on when and how the handover from marketing to SDR to AE happens. You will also need to train and coach your marketing and salespeople – both SDRs and AEs - on how to use social media, especially LinkedIn. I don’t think that posting and engaging should require any additional resources, but it does require that your staff learn new skills.
THE CONTENT
SOCIAL MEDIA ESPECIALLY ON LINKEDIN
International Inbound Lead Generation
Languages and local environments What about languages? Do you need to make the content available in more languages? That depends on the type of product you are offering. If you for example want to sell ERP systems in Germany, then you need to communicate in German. If you want to sell CRM in France, then you need to communicate in French. In general, you can say that the more local competition you face and the smaller the companies you sell to are the more you are required to communicate in the local language. If what you offer is not readily available elsewhere and you sell to bigger or specialised companies, then my recommendation will be to start with English. There are more than a billion people in the world using English as their first or second language. There are people in all countries that read and understand English. The more niche your product is the more likely it is that English will get you a long way.
Time to implement How long will it take to get the 10-step method implemented? From the time that you have your content production in place I would say three months. You should aim at releasing one new article, podcast, video, e-book or some other format each week. Remember that some of these assets are reformatting of the same content, so publishing once a week should be possible.
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About the author Hans Peter Bech is an Amazon bestselling author. He is a frequent blogger on how to make information technology companies global market leaders and has written several books and numerous whitepapers on international business development in the IT industry. Hans Peter also facilitates workshops for the TBK Academy® and is an advisor for governments and companies. He holds a M.Sc. in macroeconomics and political science from the University of Copenhagen.
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