Customer success boosts B2B lead quality - here are 4 strategies to get it right

Digitalzone explores four ways B2B lead gen, coupled with effective customer success strategies, is key to fundamental marketing.

B2B marketing is a numbers game. For each campaign, release, or targeted ad, there’s an adjacent metric. The numbers fluctuate anywhere from “this will work” to “well, boys, we can quit now. Leads for the year.”

Amid the flurry of numbers, there’s one universal one golden pillar of success - high quality leads. This sliver of leads are impossible to predict while desperately coveted. Sounds tough, right?

What if we told you that there's a secret ingredient that can dramatically enhance the quality of these leads?

Customer success (CS).

Yes, CS. No, don’t roll your eyes yet.

When properly harnessed, a killer customer success strategy significantly improves the caliber of leads attracted to your business. Give us five minutes to prove how a powerful synergy between CS and lead quality can drive business growth and maximize ROI.

Basics: Unravel the role of CS in B2B lead generation

At its core, CS is about ensuring that customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service. It revolves around understanding customer needs, designing solutions to meet those needs, and consistently delivering value. This relentless focus on value delivery naturally aligns with the generation of high-quality leads.

How?

When businesses prioritize CS, they naturally foster a customer-centric culture. Everyone – from sales and marketing, to c-suite execs have generated an ideal customer, outlined their problems, and drafted their own way of explaining how the org provides a solution.

Taking a customer-focused approach steers the lead generation process, ensuring that the leads generated are a perfect fit with the company's ideal customer profile.

Strategies: Harness CS to amplify B2B lead quality

Let me state an obvious fact: effectively leveraging CS to enhance lead quality is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It requires strategic thinking, careful planning, and an in-depth understanding of your customers and how they interact with your business.

Prepare to spend some quality time with your customer profiles. Prepare to spend some date nights pouring over data. More importantly, take a hint from us and start with the following:

1. Develop a detailed buyer persona

The journey toward generating high-quality leads begins with a thorough understanding of your ideal customer. By leveraging intel gathered from CS, you can craft a detailed buyer persona.

A detailed buyer persona should encapsulate not just demographic data but also qualitative elements about an individual such as:

• Pain points

• Goals

• Motivations

• Behavioral patterns

These personas act as a compass, guiding your marketing efforts to resonate with potential leads and generate more meaningful engagement. Better understanding = better targeting = better quality leads. Capiche?

2. Implement lead scoring

Lead scoring. Consider lead scoring as a secret number assigned to each prospect – that number is based on their propensity to convert (via a secret formula designed by sales).

Then it’s simple math. You wouldn’t give a #8 lead the same treatment as a #1, right?

Rather than pursuing all leads with equal priority and energy, lead scoring allows marketers to concentrate their efforts on nurturing high-potential leads first. As a result, you can guarantee a more efficient use of resources and increase the chances of successful conversions.

The secret formula I mentioned above is really a highly-calibrated model developed by CS and sales. The CS team holds valuable, contextual information about the data on which behaviors and characteristics determine a high-value customer – and how to know when a customer is/isn't likley to churn.

3. Embrace account-based marketing (ABM)

Another strategy for ‘ya. ABM.

ABM shift the status quo; instead of marketing to a general ideal profile or buyer, we begin to treat high-value prospects or customer accounts as markets in their own right. Example: we’re not creating a campaign for a 10-year cybersecurity exec with a hole in their data privacy. We’re creating a campaign for two specific Microsoft cybersecurity team members.

In order to target with this level of specificity, you’re going to need your CS team to provide invaluable insights into key accounts that can inform ABM strategies. This ensures a highly personalized approach that resonates with each account, leading to better engagement and higher conversion rates.

Many marketers report observing a positive correlation ABM and CS. According to software company DemandScience, 80% of marketers say that ABM improves their customer lifetime value and 86% also say it improves their win rates.

4. Commit to lead nurturing

Lead nurturing involves developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel and beyond. CS teams play a pivotal role in this process by sharing valuable insights into customer needs and preferences, which enable marketers to fine-tune their messaging and interactions with leads.

With the support of a CS team, marketers can learn about positive customer stories and tailor their communications in a way that accelerates the journey from lead to customer. Fostering stronger relationships ultimately delivers higher-quality lead wins since they are new buyers who already have deep trust in your brand.

Long-tail: Why CS and B2B marketing improve each other with time

Like any healthy relationship – CS and B2B marketing make each other better over time. The path to both love and high-quality B2B leads isn't a quick race but rather, a long-distance run. It demands ongoing dedication to learning, adapting, and refining marketing strategies.

From implementing ABM to lead scoring development, the integration of CS into your B2B lead generation strategy can have far-reaching effects on the quality of leads generated. High-quality leads are more likely to convert into customers, driving revenue growth and improving ROI.

Moreover, a focus on CS can also contribute to improved customer retention. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat customers, creating a virtuous cycle of increased revenue, enhanced brand reputation, and the attraction of further high-quality leads.

If you can manage to keep the magic alive, the relationship between CS and B2B marketing can sustain years of high-quality leads and enduring expansion.