B2B Lead Generation
Leads is a business term given to those people who have been identified as potential customers for your business. In sales, B2B lead generation is carried out through cold calling, cold emailing, social selling, and sales cadences. For demand generation, marketers leverage several tactics such as Growth hacking, Content marketing, and Account-based marketing (ABM).
A sales team focused on B2B lead generation is often split into two groups:
- Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) - this group is responsible for sourcing and scoring leads, engaging with them, and booking meetings.
- Business Development Managers (BDMs) - this group is responsible for conducting demos, closing deals, and generating revenue for the business.
There are two types of B2B lead:
1) Marketing-qualified leads, or MQLs, are targeted leads who are deemed very likely to become paying customers. The qualification is based on the engagement that the MQL has had with your marketing efforts such as filling out a form, downloading a piece of content that your company has produced, or signing up to attend one of your company’s events or webinars.
2) Sales-qualified leads, or SQLs, are MQLs who have shown intent to buy your company’s product or service and are deemed to be ready for engagement with your sales team. Leads can express intent during a telephone conversation with a member of your sales team, or by indicating their interest in an email or LinkedIn message or by asking for a demo of your product or service.
Why do you need to automate meeting scheduling?
A meaningful and memorable experience starts with a connection. Converting leads into meetings is a critical part of the lead-generation process. The longer you take to move someone through your sales process, the more risk you have of not being able to get someone on a call. Speed matters. It’s recommended to engage your leads quickly with a call or email after the initial point of contact. Because Fast Response Times = Higher Conversion Rates. Moving fast helps you stay ahead of your competition because if you’re not moving fast enough, someone else will.
There is no single formula to improve your response time to the lead. There are, however, a variety of actionable tactics and tools available to businesses of all sizes to engage their leads in a timely manner. Doing so not only provides a better customer experience but is a proven way to improve conversion rates.
When a prospect is ready to talk to sales, the last thing you want getting in the way is scheduling. Because scheduling a meeting with clients, or prospects can become challenging when everyone's schedules are similarly jam-packed. A great deal of valuable time can be wasted by means of back-and-forth emails or messages to decide the meeting time.
Prospects might not show their interest by contacting your sales team to schedule a meeting. You need to have a way of empowering prospects to schedule a meeting themselves, on their own time, right when they are interested.
Appointments take time, but scheduling shouldn’t. Online appointment scheduling software gives your customers the ability to book meeting 24/7 without back-and-forth emails or messages. This convenience factor is a major selling point for customers. If you're in sales, then you know that time is money. And if you're not using appointment scheduling software, you're losing out on potential sales. Scheduling software helps you keep track of your appointments and leads, so you can close more deals and boost your sales.
What Is a Revenue Operations Team Structure?
A revenue operations team combines team members from revenue-generating functions such as sales, marketing, and customer success into one group or department. Most of the business processes of the revenue team are automated, except for scheduling the meetings. The meeting lifecycle still suffers from too much manual effort. Revenue-generating activities happen before and after a salesperson meets with a prospect: to move a deal along, to close, and to onboard with customer success. A scheduling automation platform needs to automate and support those activities.
A typical sales life cycle has the following steps:
- A prospect fills out a form or responds to a cold outreach email
- SDR does a discovery call with the prospect
- Once SDR qualifies the lead, the lead is sent to AE for the next step of the sales process e.g.: Product demo scheduling
- Follow-up meetings will happen with the prospect by including additional stakeholders and influencers. Some of these meetings may involve procurement and legal until the contract is signed.
- Once a deal is closed, AE schedules a kick-off meeting with the customer success team and the customer.
- Then, the customer success team leads the customer through the implementation process.
- CSM schedules quarterly or monthly meetings with AE for upsell/cross-sell opportunities.
Meeting reminders, and follow-ups are exchanged throughout the revenue lifecycle. Without automated scheduling, scheduling meetings requires a great deal of manual intervention. This will severely affect productivity, provide poor customer experiences, and compromise revenue.
Automate the sales cycle to increase pipeline and revenue
It is recommended for revenue teams automate both outbound and inbound meeting scheduling. For example, prospects can click the “Book a Demo” button on your website and immediately schedule a call with an SDR. Automating that demo call significantly speeds up the scheduling process, allowing you to gain a competitive edge by responding to prospects first.
Outbound sales
- Salespeople can add their scheduling links to their website, emails, text messages, WhatsApp, or social media profiles such as LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Salespeople can add their scheduling link to their email signature as “Book a meeting” to encourage customers to book time with them easily.
- Salespeople can add their scheduling link to their automated email “drip” sequences in Sales engagement software such as Outreach, Salesloft, and more.
Inbound sales
- Use Scheduling Link as the call-to-action (CTA) in your marketing campaigns to enable your customers or prospects to schedule time with your sales team at their convenience.
- Add scheduling links to your website so that clients/prospects book meetings/demos easily
Team scheduling pages
- Setting up a team booking page for your sales team is a good way to ease your people into inbound scheduling.
- Using the team booking page, a prospect can select from several meeting options to meet with your team.
- Set up a collective appointment type on the team page if you want the customer to book an appointment with several of your team members at one time. It’s suitable for Product Demo or Discovery sessions. Check this blog to know more about multi-host (collective) appointment scheduling.
- Set up a round-robin appointment type on the team page to pool the availability of all team members and automatically distribute new meetings to team members. This kind of appointment type is suitable for sales calls, support calls, and client onboarding. Check this blog to know more about round-robin appointment scheduling.
Qualify customers and point them to the right resource
Make use of Routing Forms (this feature is coming soon in Leadmonk) to screen customers with qualifying questions — around company size, industry, region, budget, etc. — before allowing a prospect to book. Based on the prospect’s answers, you can route them to a certain salesperson for scheduling meetings.
Customer Success - Improve onboarding, retention, support, and growth
Just as meetings help move a sales deal along, meetings between customer experience (CX) teams and customers help onboard new users, upsell or cross-sell products/services, and renew subscriptions. Using online appointment scheduling software, companies can save several hours per month from wasting on scheduling meetings and spending that time on customer support.
Team scheduling pages
- Set up a team booking page for your customers to book a meeting when they need help, want to learn something new, or have subscription renewal questions.
- Add scheduling automation to your website, especially on web pages dedicated to current customers or support hubs, and allow customers to book time with a customer success manager or support rep.
- Set up a collective appointment type if you want the customer to book an appointment with several of your team members at one time (e.g., a customer success specialist and product expert joining a call to help a customer set up a new feature/integration).
- Set up a Round Robin appointment type to pool the availability of all support team members and automatically distribute new meetings to support specialists.
- Ask qualifying questions using Routing Forms and route meeting requests to the right support specialist.
Appointment Lifecycle automation
- Leadmonk offers Workflow, which is an automation that is triggered throughout the appointment lifecycle, from the time an appointment is scheduled all the way through your follow-up with customers.
- Leadmonk provides a frictionless booking experience to your customers with automatic time zone detection, Zoom, and other video conferencing tools integration.
- Using customer intake forms, get all the info you need from customers before the meeting. By reviewing the information, the customer has already provided in advance, your sales team can serve them better on the call.
- Your customers can easily reschedule or cancel the appointment from the appointment details page.
- Using Custom Intake Forms, you can get all the info you need from invitees before the appointment.
- Promote your brand at every touchpoint. Personalize your booking page to match your online branding by adding a logo, profile photo, banner, social media links, contact details, text and button colors, and personalized message to your invitee flow.
- Localize the scheduling experience for your customer with booking pages in different languages such as English, Spanish, Deutsch, French, Italian, Romanian, Greek, Korean, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Russian and Swedish, and Portuguese.
Workflow
Workflow automation is an amazing way to get things done quickly and efficiently. By setting up triggers and actions, you can automate many of the tasks that you would otherwise have to do manually. The benefits of workflow automation are many and varied, but they all boil down to one thing: making your life easier. By automating repetitive tasks, businesses can save time and money.
Automating your workflows can help you work smarter, not harder. By automating notifications, reminders, follow-ups, and thank you messages, businesses can improve efficiency and customer satisfaction. You can customize workflow steps and email and SMS templates as per your business requirements.
Engage with the prospect or customer before the meeting
- Make the best first impression for any meeting using workflows.
- Automatically send informative content or meeting agenda so your prospects or customers feel prepared and ready to engage and ask questions at the upcoming meeting.
- You can reduce no-shows and keep meetings top of mind with reminders automation for your customers. Not only you can set multiple reminders at different intervals but also you can specify channels such as email, SMS/WhatsApp to send reminders to your customers.
- At the time of appointment booking, your customers can specify whether they want to receive appointment updates as SMS or WhatsApp message.
Keep the client warm after the meeting
- Your meeting lifecycle isn’t over when the meeting ends. Send a follow-up email or a customer survey to allow your prospect or customer to continue their journey to learn more about your business and share their feedback.
- Send a quick “thank you” email/message to make your customers feel appreciated and ready for the next engagement.
Automate post-meeting admin tasks
- Take scheduling automation a step further to alleviate the admin tasks that take up too much time after each meeting or the tasks your team might forget to do.
- Automatically add the meeting to your CRM so you can properly track engagement.
- Using Zapier/Webhooks, you can update other platforms/solutions that fit into your reporting or workflow needs.
How booking software boosts the revenue
There are several ways that a revenue team can boost their revenue using online meeting scheduling software:
1) Increased productivity: Online meeting scheduling software can help streamline the scheduling process, freeing up time for the revenue team to focus on other revenue-generating activities.
2) Increased efficiency: By automating the scheduling process, online meeting scheduling software can help reduce errors and misunderstandings, which can lead to increased efficiency and revenue.
3) Increased customer satisfaction: By providing a convenient and easy-to-use scheduling experience, online meeting scheduling software can help increase customer satisfaction, which can lead to increased revenue through repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals.
4) Increased flexibility: Online meeting scheduling software allows customers to schedule appointments at their convenience, which can increase revenue by making it easier for customers to do business with the company.
5) Increased availability: By making it easy for customers to schedule appointments, online meeting scheduling software can help increase revenue by making it easier for customers to access services and products.
6) Increased reach: Online meeting scheduling software can help increase revenue by making it easier for the revenue team to reach and serve a wider customer base, including customers in different locations or time zones.
Increase your bookings by reducing the customer friction
Leadmonk is a mobile-first scheduling platform that offers flexible booking options, automated reminders, and promotional landing pages. It reduces the booking friction by giving the flexibility to your customers to book appointments using their mobile number or email address without the back-and-forth emails or messages. You can let invitees opt-in for WhatsApp or SMS notifications if they book with their mobile number, so they get updates on the go.
Meet one-on-one or in a group or as a team (Collective, and Round Robin appointment types). Meet online or in person. Leadmonk supports all meeting combinations.
It is built for customer-facing teams such as Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Freelancers, and Consultants. It is also suitable for industry sectors such as Doctors, Dentists, Chiropractors, Entrepreneurs, Educators, Coaches, Recruiters, and Professional Services companies such as Legal, Accounting, and Real Estate.
It integrates natively with Google, G-Suite, Outlook, and Office 365 Calendars, Google Meet, MS Teams, Zoom, Stripe, PayPal, Zapier, HubSpot, and other popular business apps to support your business in a wide range of prospect and customer scheduling scenarios.
It is perfect for any person or business no matter if you are starting off or have been around for a while.
Save time on scheduling. Spend time on the things that matter. Check leadmonk.io to know more.
