Outbound sales in most B2B companies often focus on volume. Out of the thousands of ICP leads that you may have, only a tiny fraction converts into customers. This means that a lot of time and effort is spent in going after leads that may not match your ideal customer profile (ICP) or may be ICP leads who are not ready to buy now.
To avoid unnecessarily going after these leads, and to optimize your outbound sales efforts, it is essential to have a list of targeted leads that your sales development representatives (SDRs) can prioritize and reach out to. Targeted lead generation involves breaking down the broader market into smaller segments that are more relevant to your business and running your demand generation campaigns for these high-value leads.
What are targeted leads?
Targeted leads are those leads that exactly match your ICP, are more likely to become your customers in the immediate or near future, have the intent to buy your product or one similar to yours. Targeted leads are usually a very small section of the entire lead list which could include leads that don’t match your ICP, leads that are your ICP but are not interested in buying now, or leads that have no intent to buy a tool like yours at all.
Targeted lead generation is the process of refining your B2B lead generation process to identify leads that are more likely to convert, and building a lead list with high-potential leads that you can spearfish.
Importance of targeted lead generation
Generating targeted leads requires more effort and time because a lot of the filtering and qualification happens before the lead enters the pipeline, but it is worth the additional effort, and should be a part of your go-to-market strategy because of the many benefits it offers.
Here’s why targeted leads are important:
Higher conversion rates
Focusing on leads that fit the ideal customer profile (ICP) will help shorten deal cycles and ensure faster deal closures, driving better sales efficiency. Instead of chasing a large number of not-perfect prospects, targeted outreach helps channel resources towards those most likely to buy.
Stronger customer relationships
Focusing on targeted leads will give you more time to personalize conversations, tailor your pitches, and engage with every contact more meaningfully. This builds trust and helps you have richer, stronger relationships. This way, even if the deal doesn’t come through at first, you can maintain the relationship and consider pitching to them at a later date.
Better ROI on sales and marketing
Targeted lead generation helps optimize resource utilization by prioritizing prospects that are more likely to buy and have shown buying intent. This improves overall ROI by ensuring every dollar spent goes toward nurturing high-intent leads rather than low-quality ones.
Spearfishing high-potential leads
Instead of casting a wide net, targeted lead generation takes the precision outreach approach. By identifying prospects engaging with competitors, discussing industry trends, or showing other intent signals, sales teams can spearfish rather than spray-and-pray.
Shorter sales cycles, lower churn
Since targeted leads already fit your ICP and show buying signals, they require less nurturing. This helps shorten sales cycles, and reduces chances of leads going silent or even churning.
Stay ahead of competitors
High-intent leads move fast and are probably also engaging with your competitors as they evaluate your product. Going after targeted leads ensures that your team doesn’t lose out to competitors, and you’re able to engage these leads proactively and maintain an edge over your competitors.
Effective targeted lead generation techniques
Running large-scale demand generation programs and marketing campaigns can bring in a high volume of leads in quick time. You might tick the check boxes of generating leads and compiling lead leads, but they serve no purpose and not all of them would be relevant to your business.
To ensure that you get the maximum ROI from your B2B lead generation efforts, here are a few things you can do:
Clearly define your ideal customer profile (ICP)
The first step to generating targeted leads is being absolutely clear on what a targeted lead looks like. This starts with defining your ICP and buyer personas. While it might be tempting to use broad filters to narrow your target market, generating truly targeted leads requires precise segmentation of your Total Addressable Market (TAM) and focusing on your ICP.
Click here for an easy-to-follow guide (and a downloadable template) on defining your ICP.
Once your ICP is defined, all your efforts can be focused on reaching this group of leads.
Segment leads based on signals such as demographics, social insight
Once the ICP has been defined, the leads can further be categorized and segmented based on different signals and data.
This helps you create an even more targeted list and streamlines your outreach process.
For example, Highperformr enables you to group leads by signals such as demographics, location, or job title. Segmentation is at the heart of Highperformr, making it easy to find leads, create targeted segments, enrich them with additional signals, and prioritize outreach based on insights.
Use data to inform your lead generation approach
Generating targeted leads requires a deeper understanding of your prospects to ensure they match your ICP. This requires you to have a lot more data about the lead than just their name and contact information. You need to enrich your leads with signals such as social intent, firmographic data, and social insights. Whether you’re using AI lead generation or traditional methods, your strategy should be built on data and signals, so as to ensure that your CRM is filled with leads that have a higher chance of converting.
Personalize communication
Personalization is critical for any outbound lead generation effort. Generic, bulk emails or messages won’t deliver results. To attract high-value leads, you need to tailor your communication to their specific needs and interests.
All your marketing campaigns, such as email marketing, ads, or other campaigns, should be as personalized as possible to capture your audience’s attention and generate relevant leads.
Tap multiple channels for outreach
Once you segment and narrow down your target audience segments, it is important to double down on the segments to generate as many targeted leads as possible. Ensure that your B2B lead generation strategy includes multiple outreach channels such as social media, paid marketing campaigns, organic leadgen programs, inbound marketing, compiling leads from third-party sources, AI lead generation programs, etc. to ensure that you target leads across all touch points.
Use social media for lead generation and social prospecting
Social media remains an underrated and underutilized leadgen channel. It is also an excellent channel for organic lead nurturing. By focusing on leadgen, you can build an account book with highly targeted leads. Using Highperformr, you can identify and analyze your social media audience, use social signals to better understand your target audience, and find high-value ICP leads who’ve shown intent by engaging with you or your competitors.
By tapping into social media for lead generation and prospecting, you’ll uncover high-potential leads that might otherwise be missed.
Run paid advertising and PPC ads
This is a proven technique to go after targeted accounts and segments. Running pay-per-click (PPC) ads, retargeting and remarketing campaigns can help generate targeted leads. You can craft and promote ads to focus on specific audiences that align with your ICP, and run campaigns with messaging that reflects their needs and resonates with them.
Participate actively in online communities
Lead generation is no longer something restricted to third-party database anymore and isn’t something that only the demand generation team manages. Thanks to social media and employee advocacy, every employee in an organization can bring leads to the table. For example, employees can use Highperformr’s social media AI Agent to easily create and publish posts on social media, cultivate their own audience, and generate leads from their social audience. This is not just on LinkedIn but across social platforms, online communities, and groups such as Slack communities or WhatsApp groups/communities.
Optimize the timing of leadgen campaigns
B2B lead generation can be quite time-sensitive especially if you want targeted leads that are more likely to convert. Use social signals, intent data, engagement data, and insights from tools like Highperformr to identify targeted leads that are in the buying process and are more likely to respond to a pitch. For example, you can track job changes on Highperformr, and identify leads that have just taken up a new role and are keen on buying a new tool to improve their productivity.
Build a referral program to generate warm leads
Referrals are one of the best ways to find targeted leads because they often come with trust built in. Nurture relationships with customers, partners, and employees so you can have them refer others like them who might find value in a product like yours. This way, you can ensure that your new leads come from within the niche you have created and other ICP personas you have worked with.
Use LinkedIn to connect with decision-makers
Social media, unlike websites, allow you to identify your audience and share content targeting your ICP. By posting consistently on social media, you’ll be able to cultivate an audience of relevant contacts, identify your targeted leads from this audience, and nurture relationships with them.
Engagement & nurturing strategies for targeted leads
One of the biggest advantages of generating targeted leads is that it shortens sales cycles. Since these leads are already qualified and match your ideal customer profile (ICP), you can skip the initial qualification steps and focus directly on engagement and nurturing the lead.
Here are some of the best practices you can follow to nudge your leads through the B2B sales pipeline.
Personalized follow-ups via email and retargeting
Customizing and tailoring your outreach to these targeted leads helps foster stronger relationships and carefully move the lead down the sales pipeline. Craft personalized conversation starters, engaging on their social media posts, and run retargeting campaigns to nurture the lead.
Content-driven engagement, including case studies and webinars
Before you ask a lead for their time and consideration, be sure to share content and insight that will be of use to them. Share playbooks, templates and case studies, invite them to participate in webinars, and provide value so you’re able to establish trust and credibility before you get into the sales pitch.
Enrich leads with real-time first-party intent signals
Most B2B businesses restrict their enrichment to email ids and phone numbers, but building a list of targeted leads requires you to go deeper. You need to enrich leads with social signals, intent data, and other insight that help you filter and prioritize your leads better. Highperformr provides users with real-time first-party signals about your lead.
Segment leads into niche groups
The spray-and-pray approach many outbound sales teams take isn’t efficient. Spearfishing leads with precision ensures more effective outreach and higher conversion rates. Segmenting your leads into niche groups allows you to personalize your outreach, tailor pitches or demos, and increase response rates. Highperformr makes it simple to generate targeted leads, segment and group them, enrich leads with social signals and insights, and use this data for precision outreach.
Use cold calling to directly engage leads
Cold calling is still one of the most direct ways to reach targeted leads when done thoughtfully. Combine it with insights from enriched lead data to personalize your pitch and address their pain points effectively. A well-timed, relevant call can often make all the difference in converting high-potential leads.
What are the benefits of targeted lead generation?
Increased conversion rates - Targeted leads are those that have already shown intent and are often further along in the buying process, so it is easier to close deals from targeted leads.
Higher return on investment (ROI)
Building a targeted lead list with leads more likely to convert ensures that you can close more deals in a shorter period of time, leading to fewer spends on resources and consequently higher ROI.
Reduced marketing costs
By focusing on a more relevant, niche segment, you can make sure your marketing efforts are also more precise, and cut any unnecessary costs involved in reaching out to leads who aren’t part of your target audience. White label marketing services can significantly enhance your service offerings without the need to build in-house capabilities.
Better customer relationships
When you generate targeted leads, you gain a deeper understanding of each contact. This helps build richer, more meaningful customer relationships as you can address their specific needs more effectively.
More effective use of resources
Targeted lead generation streamlines your process by eliminating unnecessary or low-impact activities upfront, and as a result, you use your resources more efficiently, focusing only on high-potential leads.
What are the challenges and disadvantages of generating targeted leads?
Targeted leads are super useful for businesses as they help improve efficiency and enable sales teams to close deals faster. We’ve also looked at some tactics that assist with targeted led generation. But building a list with highly-targeted leads comes with its set of challenges and hurdles. Here are a few potential obstacles you need to be aware of before investing in targeted lead generation programs:
Higher initial costs
Focused or targeted lead generation can be quite as it requires more time, efforts, and specialized tools. While the ROI is high, the initial expenses associated with precise audience targeting can be unaffordable for companies with tight budgets.
Complex to execute
Targeted lead generation is not as simple as other kinds of B2B lead generation. Taking the targeted approach to lead generation can involve multiple steps, and require advanced tools to execute the program consistently. The complexity stems from the fact that the kind of leads you go after is limited or narrowed, which means there’s a risk of inadvertently missing certain high-potential leads. Putting processes and checks in place to handle this can be complicated.
Difficult to scale
Targeted lead generation essentially means limiting the reach of marketing and demand generation efforts and focusing on a smaller cross section of the target market. This may make it difficult to scale. Moreover, nurturing these targeted leads requires additional efforts such as personalization, which might be difficult to scale.
Identifying the right target audience
One of the biggest challenges is identifying the exact audience that you want to target. Since targeted lead generation involves focusing efforts on a small segment rather than spreading efforts across a larger base, it is critical to be doubly sure about the segment you want to target. This is where defining your ICP clearly will help.
Maintaining accurate and up-to-date data
Working on targeted leads requires a well-enriched, up-to-date CRM that provides you with a host of signals and insights about leads. Outdated or incomplete information can lead to wasted outreach and missed opportunities.
High costs of acquisition
Targeted leads are more likely to convert and are more efficient, but acquiring them comes at a cost. The research, tools, and resources required to identify and engage these leads are not as affordable as other traditional lead generation techniques. However, tools like Highperformr enables you to find, segment, and enrich leads with multiple signals, offering you better ROI than other forms of lead generation.
Complexity of effective segmentation
Targeted lead generation involves carefully breaking your leads into smaller, niche groups, and this demands time and effort. Poor segmentation can lead to irrelevant outreach, reducing the chances of conversion.
Find targeted leads with Highperformr
Highperformr has been created on the premise that spearfishing is the right way to approach outbound sales , and that the spray-and-pray approach is no longer efficient. Segments form the core of Highperformr, and the product has been designed to make it easy and efficient to find and identify targeted leads, segment them and group them based on signals, enrich leads with social signals and insight to prioritize outreach, and nurture leads better to drive higher conversion rates. To learn more about how to use Highperformr to find and engage with targeted leads, schedule a demo with our AI lead generation expert today!
