GDPR-Compliant B2B Lead Generation Success Factors

Acquiring new customers: Necessary conditions

1. Personality

Successful lead generation does not work with blunt sales messages. Your cold outreach ROI will sucks if you work with a sales pitch instead of enabling an initial conversation with a human being. One-sided sales pitches are a nuisance. A bespoke handwritten message only has an effect on the recipient if it is a PERSONAL message from one human being to another. Your recipients must feel personally touched by your expression of appreciation.

2. What's in it for (one)?

Your message must directly get at the WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME (WIIFM). Your mission is to engage the audience — to get them interested, give them a reason to engage with you. Point out the benefits you will be able to generate for the recipient or limit yourself to the expression of appreciation. What benefits can the recipient gain from dealing with you? Refer to a landing page for any further/advertising information that underlines your statements, but please do not write a one-page marketing text. Be relevant or accept failure.

3. "Keep It Simple Stupid" (K.I.S.S.)

Handwritten notes can make an important contribution to your B2B lead generation goals. Your handwritten sales letters or invitations can achieve open rates of up to 99% and response rates between 10 and 40 percent. Yes, that’s massive in comparison to any other lead generation tactic you can think of. The recipient of your message automatically – on a subconscious level – assesses the perceived costs that the sender has invested in his message. This is called “costly signaling”. On this page, you will find the most important success factors so that also your B2B lead generation campaign with Pensaki can also be extremely successful.Acquiring new customers with handwritten letters is not the silver bullet. Successful lead generation campaigns require more than a handwritten note. However, if you consider these success factors you will be rewarded with outstanding results. Always focus on enabling a first conversation instead of one-sided sales messages.Important requirements for sales success are resilience and attention to details. This is especially true for the daily fight for attention. Handwritten messages offer an outstanding opportunity to stand out from the competition. At the same time, handwritten letters are not a sufficient condition for marketing success. Those who pay attention to the interaction of success factors will be rewarded with outstanding results. For example, response rates of 20 to 40 percent are quite realistic. The most beautiful handwriting only has an effect on the recipient if the associated message is right and the recipient really feels personally addressed. Therefore, you should invest enough time and effort in the form and content of your text beforehand.

Customer Acquisition 101

4. Creating An Ideal Customer Profile

The more precise your target group definition, the more successful your campaign can be. For which industries are your solutions ideal to generate demonstrable added value? Which company size is ideal to generate these results? Which decision-makers benefit most from this added value? How can these results be quantified?Creating a list of existing customers that have been very successful with your solution/services is a great point to start with. Then ask yourself about their key characteristics on a company level.An ideal customer profile is a description of your target companies on a meta-level, i.e. not the individual buyer or end-user — that can generate the most benefits from your solution or services. Your solution needs to solve a compelling event that those organizations face.The ideal customer profile can include e.g these characteristics:1. Geography2. Industry/vertical3. Employee headcount4. Annual revenue or size of their customer base5. Technologies used (ERP, CRM, etc.)

5. Data quality is extremely important in B2B lead generation

A handwritten sales letter must always be addressed to one person (correctly and completely). A letter addressed in this way must refer to the professional function of the person and may of course only be sent to the person’s business address. Please never write “to the marketing management” or similar. Such a formulation allows only one conclusion: the sender has spared the effort and time to find out the details. In this way nobody can feel “personally” addressed. The appreciation conveyed in handwriting then simply reaches into the void.

6. Communication Channel Exclusivity

Under no circumstances should the content of your handwritten message been sent in parallel by email. A lack of response to these messages cannot be compensated by a handwritten “magic hand”. Therefore, make sure that you always keep the handwritten content exclusive.

Lead generation: High-Quality Content Is Vital

7. Personalization matters

Of course, the relevance of the content is the decisive factor for the success of your customer acquisition campaign. Your “handwritten” message must address the recipient personally and be bursting with relevance. Banal advertising messages remain banal even in “handwriting”. Of course, every successful personalization begins with the correct and complete postal address. It is therefore essential that you check that all master data is up-to-date before sending a high-quality handwritten advertising letter by post. Under no circumstances should you use an impersonal form of address. This is because it is impossible for you to express a personal reference or esteem in this way; only specified people can be held in esteem. If you nevertheless use this address, make it clear that you have not had the time and/or time to take a look at the company.

8. Benefits Sell, Features alone don't

Your latest and greatest features simply mean nothing to your prospects unless they effectively translate into lower costs, quicker delivery or something else of value. Being established 400 years ago or having received 1000 bn in venture capital funding means nothing to your prospects unless that feature can be translated into a benefit of reliability and a guarantee of being in business in the future.Prospects and customers in general simply don’t care about statements about product features: You need to tell your prospects how their life or business will improve as a result of buying your product or service. They expect to obtain a significant business result (either improving opportunity/capability or reducing pain). Product features are generic, while benefits are personal. If something is a feature, every customer can take advantage of it. A benefit, on the other hand, usually applies to a very specific subset of customers, your ideal customers. Therefore it is very critical to know your buyer’s goals, challenges, and desires. Tipp: Ask yourself this: “will this aspect of our product/service help the prospect to achieve their goals or alleviate their pain? If the answer is no, simply skip this aspect in your messaging.Focus on what matters most, because when explaining benefits, quality always beats quantity.

9. Keep it crisp and clear

K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple stupid) – Short/simple sentences are more catchy and therefore easier to understand. Avoid stringing together worn-out phrases or buzzwords, do not annoy the reader with PR bullshit lingo. If the recipient of your letter decides for himself that you can’t be brief and that you are a time bandit, then you have a real problem. Formulate your statements, in short, concise sentences, try to have an activating effect by stimulating curiosity and not indifference. Refer to a landing page for all further/advertising information. A successful sales letter NEVER exceeds the length of a DIN A4 page! Bad acquisition letters are very often full of buzz words, anglicisms, abbreviations, and boring phrases. Successful Akquisebriefe are not written in an artificial language, but formulated target group-fairly briefly & scarcely. Write simple sentences that are not nested.

Follow-Up is Where Most Deals are Lost or Won.

The 3% rule: approach clients before they need you.

Even the best-handwritten sales letter is often only a first professional "knock" on a potential customer's door (cold contact). Even if these letters rarely go unheeded, a direct response usually requires more (timing, relevance, priorities, etc.). Therefore, plan your sales campaigns from the outset in such a way that the follow-up telephone call is made a few days after the letter has been sent. Tip: Call to find out whether the recipient has received the letter!

According to research, ONLY ABOUT THREE PERCENT OF YOUR TARGET MARKET IS ACTUALLY READY TO BUY FROM YOU NOW, the rest is NOT YET. These prospects are the companies that have a need and are actively looking for a solution, based on a compelling event and available budget. Those prospects want to make a purchase within the next ninety days.All other potential customers might have a need but are not proactively looking for options yet. A well-planned cold call or marketing campaign can be very effective because they are open to new ideas. Others might already have a need, but not enough to act now. Those companies may look and behave like potential customers, but they will not commit within the next 90 days. They currently simply have different priorities. Your sales success, therefore, depends strongly on how successful you are in following up your existing contacts. Without follow-up activities, you leave your business success to chance. 90% of recipients of handwritten PENSAKI letters will remember receiving the letter positively. Use this priceless advantage e.g. for a follow-up call.

“Only about 3% of your ideal customers are ready to make a purchase in the next 30-90 days, 97% currently are NOT.”

3% rule explains why follow-up is of great importance. Your sales success depends heavily on how successful you are at following up your existing contacts. Without follow-up activities, you leave your business success to chance. 90% of recipients of handwritten letters will remember receiving the letter positively. Make use of this priceless advantage!