How to get quality leads: 5 ways many teams overlook

Three professionals working on a laptop with text "want to find more leads?"

With the year-end just around the corner, many sales teams are hustling to hit their targets. This often means finding ways to get more quality leads, boost conversion rates, and improve reps’ efficiency.

Since improving conversion rates and efficiency require significant planning and new processes, most sales teams rely on their marketing teams to squeeze as many leads as possible out of the existing inbound efforts.

Fortunately, there are lead generation tactics that sales can drive themselves to quickly fill up the pipeline. If you’ve been wondering how to get quality leads look no further.

5 ways to generate high-quality leads

1. Target your previous customers

Job changes are one of the most frequent trigger events in sales. According to reports from Paysa and The Atlantic, employees in the top 10 tech companies switch their jobs on average every 20 months. This number is even lower for startups at 10.9 months. This means, assuming your product has 10,000 users, there are 500 warm leads every month that your team can prospect to immediately.

Knowing this, high-performing reps often randomly check if any of their previous contacts have joined a new company so they can sell to them again. Similar to targeting closed lost accounts, the advantage here is that the contacts already know your product. Therefore, reps spend less time pitching what the product is and more time on discovering how to help the contacts succeed in their new roles. Plus, the outreach is often perceived as personalized and timely which increases your open and response rates.

You can use sales intelligence software like UserGems to completely automate and scale this tactic for your entire sales team. UserGems tracks your users for job changes and surfaces them as new leads along with new job information, work email, and LinkedIn profiles directly in your Salesforce CRM.

Learn which contacts you should track for job changes

‍

You can then add these leads to your email sequences. Here is an example of an outreach email that sounds personalized but is completely automated.

‍

Re-engage closed-lost accounts

Closed lost deals are the low-hanging fruit because these accounts were already qualified by the sales team. Reaching out to these accounts after a cooling period (between 30 to 180 days, depending on your product) with a special offering, such as a discount or complimentary services, can produce a quick uptick in the lead volume.

This is where CRM hygiene pays off. The more information you have about the deals, the better you can segment these lost accounts and use the right messaging and offers to bring them back.

For example, if the deal was lost because of their internal resource constraints, you could include a thought-leadership content along with a complementary implementation service to accelerate their time to value.

Alternatively, if the deal was lost to a competitor, you could highlight your new product features and capabilities in a way that puts a spotlight on your competitor’s limitations. Not only this would be more compelling than using your generic messaging but coupled with an offering for a migration service, it could also result in a new sales opportunity.

Target competitor's customers

There are many ways to identify your competitor’s customers for a competitive campaign. They are often listed on your competitor’s website, customer stories, case studies, joint press releases, blogs, and social media. Obtaining this list requires some manual research, but with a couple of hours on Google, you’ll identify not only a list of accounts but also the buyers in those accounts.

If your product is embedded into websites (i.e.if it’s built with Javascript), you could use tools such as BuiltWith or Datanyze to find out which companies are using your competitor’s products. For example, you can use this method to find out which websites are using Drift versus Intercom as their live chat solution.

Combining these leads with the closed lost deals due to the “competition” reason in your CRM can generate a sizeable list for a competitive campaign. Just make sure to include a relevant landing page and comparison content in your emails.

Capture leads in forums

Outside of search engines, forums such as Quora, Reddit are some of the few places where buyers clearly signal their purchase intent.

A quick browse of these sites and you’ll see countless buying discussions, such as: “Has anyone used tool X? What are your thoughts about them?”, or “What are the differences between tool A and tool B…?”

To execute this tactic at scale, partner with your marketing team. There are numerous social listening tools available and it is likely that your marketing colleagues are already using one of them for social media monitoring, which can also be used for high-quality lead generation.

An example is Awario which is a social media monitoring platform that also offers a Leads feature as a free add-on to the reputation management feature set.

Capture leads from review sites

Savvy buyers always check review sites before having a conversation with sales reps. If your product doesn’t show up on these sites with reviews, you are leaving deals on the table for your competitors.

Depending on your targeted industry but we’ve found G2Crowd and Gartner Peer Insights popular for SaaS buyers, with the latter one focusing more on the enterprise accounts.

G2Crowd also functions as a lead generator - prospects can submit a quote request which is then forwarded to your sales or marketing team. They also offer real-time alerts that tell you when a prospect views or compares your G2 Crowd profile.

Again, your marketing and customer success teams are your partners to execute this tactic.

Prioritize high-quality lead generation

When you generate high-quality leads for the pipeline, you often overlook contacts who evaluated or used our product in the past. However, these contacts often yield higher conversion rates than typical leads. Therefore, it is beneficial to supplement your typical cold leads with your existing contacts from the CRM and the product's user base.

Regardless of your choice of tactics, don’t forget to enable your reps with the right training, messaging and talk tracks to convert those leads into deals.And measure the results frequently to make adjustments along the way.

Get a cheatsheet to frow your pipeline with warm leads

What is UserGems?

UserGems helps revenue teams drive bigger pipeline and faster sales cycle. Whenever your customers change their jobs, UserGems automatically surfaces them as new leads directly in Salesforce. This allows reps to be in front of the right buyers at the right time, and ahead of the competitors.