Qualified and experienced sales and marketing teams can play a vital role in the success of a business. Irrespective of your products or services, your marketing strategy can boost RoI and ensure customer satisfaction.
Lead generation experts are known for providing impactful services to your business’s sales and marketing objectives.
A lead generation expert or lead gen specialist is a skilled individual who aggregates and examines golden opportunities to improve RoI.
As businesses continue to expand, companies have to recruit more lead generation specialists to help their sales team in engaging new prospects. A lead generation expert offers their services to handle and reform the lead generation process to engage and analyze leads effectively.
In this blog post, we will discuss the role of lead generation specialists in detail. It will include the responsibilities lead generation specialists have to deal with & how one can become a lead generation expert.
Responsibilities of Lead Generation Specialist
Contacting Prospects
Once a lead generation expert understands and develops a buyer persona for a business, they start interacting with the customer as an initial lead generation phase. This initial engagement can occur by telephone or sending emails to ensure a prospect’s interest in your company’s offerings.
For now, cold calling is still considered an impactful sales and marketing strategy to generate a list of prospects interested in your products or services. While it possesses multiple hurdles, such as constant failure in acquiring leads, cold calling can be crafted as one of the most effective lead generation skills.
Lead Scoring
A lead generation expert can qualify and score the lead by analyzing a prospect’s likelihood to become a sale. It is one of the most crucial aspects of a lead generation specialist job description that involves comprehensive R&D. It involves the lead generation skill to differentiate between prospects interested in buying the product or needing further nurturing to reach the bottom of the sales funnel.
There are three types of leads based on their score and qualification:
- MQL
- PQL
- SQL
Although the nature of MQL, PQL, and SQL is not absolute and depends solely on the business model of a particular business, these three levels of qualified lead are the fundamental base of any lead generation model.
Below are some essential differences that lead generation experts leverage to qualify these leads based on their interests and behavior.
Prospects are considered Market Qualified Leads (MQLs) if they’ve interacted with a brand’s marketing content at any stage of the buyer’s journey.
Some signs of MQLs include downloading brand content such as ebooks, white papers, or subscribing to a newsletter by providing their contact info. Prospects can also be declared low-scoring MQLs if they engage with your social media content by liking, commenting, and sharing.
Some prospects have previously purchased or used a brand’s product (paid or free version). If they still show their interest and potential of investing more in your products or services, they are considered Product Qualified Leads (PQLs).
For instance, prospects who use your mobile application’s free or trial version would be considered PQLs. They need a slight nurturing to become a paying customer by upgrading to the paid version of your app.
Leads are considered Sales qualified (SQLs) once they start showing interest in the product or its features. It goes beyond just reading marketing content and enjoying free offers.
Examples of SQL actions include asking for a price structure and product features and prospects who skip product demos and connect directly to your sales team.
How to Become a Lead Generation Specialist
This blog section will discuss how you can become a lead generation specialist? Below are some vital steps that are mandatory to fulfill the requirement of a lead generation specialist job description.
Step One: Learn the Fundamental of Job Role
Before mastering the art of lead generation, you need to begin your journey by establishing a fundamental knowledge base of the position.
It is vital to acknowledge the lead generation model, the three primary stages of the lead generation funnel, and why it is beneficial to businesses.
Step Two: Understanding Different Aspects of Marketing
The best lead generation specialist is not just good at engaging and converting new leads. Instead, a one who understands a wide array of different marketing methodologies and can indeed interpret & predict the prospect’s behavior.
After all, once you know how to predict how a lead perceives your products or services as a viable solution to their problem, it becomes more accessible to covert them.
Step Three: Become Familiar with Metrics
A significant aspect of the lead generation expert’s job is to evaluate the lead metrics to find valuable insights into the prospect’s behavior.
You need to be familiar with key ideas like return on investment (ROI), sales qualified leads (SQLs), market qualified leads (MQLs), win rate (WR), cost per lead (CPL), cost per acquisition (CPA), and others.
Step Four: Get Experience
If you plan on becoming a highly skilled lead generation expert, the next important step is to get industry exposure.
Having successful case studies to show consulting businesses or clients is fruitful in strengthening your foundation in the job market.
Explore home-based projects or freelance opportunities, then implement your learnings to handle more complex business models.
Step Five: Put Together a Portfolio
Once you’ve attained a bit of experience as a lead generation expert, it is recommended to compile an extensive portfolio of your successful lead generation campaigns.
Include KPIs like performance metrics, case studies, and even client recommendations if possible. The more comprehensive your portfolio will be, the more you shine among competitors.
Step Six: Network with Others
An immature but innovative lead generation specialist does not refrain from getting in touch with big fishes in the market. After all, that’s a significant contributor to the growth.
Spare a decent amount of time to connect with other experts in the digital marketing industry. Find relevant professionals on Linkedin and increase your connections. It will help you get a better opportunity faster.
Step Seven: Constantly Improve Your Processes
The good news is that the lead generation specialist job descriptions continuously evolve.
As emerging SaaS practices and CRM platforms are changing the digital makeup of the industry, there is always a void to fill with modern lead generation practices.
Even the debut of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics opened vital opportunities for growth within digital marketing.
All you have to do is, explore and crack new opportunities by developing your skillset around modern AI methodologies and data analytics.
Step Eight: Go After Your Dream Job
If you aim to become a lead generation expert, it is vital to take calculated risks to crack your dream job.
Always remain proactive to reveal your skillset to digital marketing firms, using outbound channels or even cold calling.
End Words
Different prospects at different B2B sales funnel stages may require varying approaches to convert. As a lead generation specialist and depending on your product or service, you can change your strategy smartly to engage the particular prospect.
Lead generation is all about understanding a prospect’s exact conflict & problem and interacting accordingly to lead the prospect towards the bottom of the sales funnel.
