In this article, we will look at the role of a lead generation professional, why it is considered pivotal in any business, the essential skills needed to become a successful lead generation specialist, and a sample job description for the role of lead generation specialist.
Table of Contents
- The Role of a Lead Generation Professional
- Why You Should Consider the Role of a Lead Generation Professional
- Key Skills to Become a Successful Lead Generation Professional
- Job Description: Lead Generation Specialist
The Role of a Lead Generation Professional
The role of a lead generation professional is pivotal to the sales process, as lead generators are ultimately responsible for identifying people who are potentially interested in your offerings, i.e., leads. In the pre-web 2.0 era, leads were extensively generated by cold-calling, but as the martech space grew rapidly, professionals integrated email marketing and social selling as well.
Today, a lead generation professional covers both – traditional and modern marketing platforms and avenues to identify and generate leads depending on the organization’s business model and team structure.
Although the lead generation personnel is a member of the sales team, they work closely with marketing as well. Along with generating new leads, they also need to stay on top of the leads generated through inbound means so that they can initiate routine follow-ups as a part of the lead nurturing process.
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Why You Should Consider the Role of a Lead Generation Professional
The role of a lead generator is often an entry point to better opportunities in sales or business development as you gain experience. Besides this, here are four reasons why you should consider this role:
1. High Demand
Every organization intends to expand its operations continually. To reach such audacious goals, it needs to have a high-performing sales team. The foundation of a successful sales team that meets and exceeds revenue goals is to cultivate a lead pipeline. Thus the sales team requires individuals who are capable of generating leads by identifying and connecting with the most relevant segment of its target audience.
2. Career Growth
The role of lead generation provides tremendous growth opportunities. For instance, depending on the industry you’re working in, as you accrue experience in your role, you stand the opportunities to be promoted to the positions of account manager, sales manager, inside sales, business development manager, strategic accounts manager, and their respective senior roles such as director, vice president, and so on.
3. Relatively Easy Entry in the Domain
Getting entry in the technology domain can be a challenge. The positions in sales are often open to people with diverse educational backgrounds as long as they possess specific skills (which we’ll see in the next section). There are no rigid criteria for anyone willing to get into the position of lead generation. If you have the right skills, the ability to grasp the characteristics of the target audience, and understand the product well enough, you’ll be well on your way to getting the desired job.
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Key Skills to Become a Successful Lead Generation Professional
In this section, we will look at the top ten skills required to become a successful lead generation specialist:
1. Tech Savviness
While communicating with prospects, it is essential to speak their language, which requires an understanding of their pain points and how your product resolves them. When working at a tech organization, you’d be not only using plenty of martech applications but also be expected to understand more about your offerings and its impact on the industry.
Being tech-savvy will help you stay on top of the latest developments in your niche, which would serve you immensely whether you’re speaking with a prospect or brainstorming with the internal team.
2. Top-Notch Communication Skills
This comes as a no-brainer. While working as a lead generation professional, it’s imperative to have excellent communication skills, which includes both – verbal and written communication. This will allow you to convey your message to your potential customers without any confusion or ambiguity.
Another crucial aspect of communication skills that is often ignored is empathy. Being empathetic means being a good listener and listening with the intent of understanding and not responding. Empathy allows you to help the buyer resolve their pain areas by showing how your product can help them, i.e., you can demonstrate what’s in it for them.
3. Cold Sales
Cold sales is often the most dreaded aspect of lead generation or sales. Cold selling could mean cold calling and email, and the reason it’s dreaded is because of the high probability of rejection. Prospects often don’t entertain cold approaches due to many reasons.
The golden rule to connect with a prospect is always to email them first. The purpose is to build rapport and reduce the hesitation when you eventually connect with them over a call. The lead generation specialist should strive to deliver value from the get-go by leveraging content marketing. As you build rapport over time, you can schedule a call to pitch your offerings and take it ahead from there.
4. Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is a process of establishing relationships with your prospects at every stage of their journey. Lead nurturing is an essential skill as it helps you decide which leads to pursue first so that the sales team closes the leads that are most likely to convert.
Lead nurturing also involves evaluating the stage of the buyer’s journey the lead is in, their behavior, lead fit, i.e., determining if the lead is worth pursuing. Based on this information, you need to rate them on a scale of 1-10, i.e., lead scoring. Higher the score the sooner they should be pursued.
The other aspect of lead nurturing includes following-up with leads regularly by sending personalized content, offering demos, and offers to nudge them to become a customer.
5. Social Selling
Social selling is the process of connecting with your prospects via social media platforms. With the rise of B2B and B2C facing platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, it has become easy to communicate with your target audience. For example, hashtags on Twitter and groups on LinkedIn provide ample opportunities for lead generation specialists to connect with prospective buyers.
While it’s become easy to approach the prospects directly, it’s still a cold approach nonetheless. Therefore, keep in mind that your purpose should always be to cultivate a relationship, and it would be different compared to cold emailing. For instance, instead of leveraging content marketing, you can use social listening to find the relevant queries in your niche, answer them, and initiate a conversation. This way, you’ll develop trust and credibility.
6. Persuasion
Persuasion is a psychological term used to describe the process of influencing a person’s attitude, thoughts, or beliefs. In the context of sales, persuasion means convincing the potential buyer to buy from you.
In the age of inbound marketing, persuasion is primarily driven by sharing industry expertise and establishing thought leadership. As a lead generation professional, when you’re approaching prospects, you should explain why they should buy your offerings. If you are strangers, you can’t just pitch your products right away, so you need to implement specific tactics to build your credibility.
To persuade them, use social proof (case studies and testimonials), demonstrate thought leadership through content, convey how your product can help them achieve their goals, and so on.
7. Understanding Buyer Personas
No two buyers are alike, and the lead generation specialist should be aware of that. You should know the key traits of your ideal buyers and their various personas. This includes the industry they work in, their job designations, size of the organization, qualification, and other demographic and psychographic information. This will tremendously help you understand the unique problems faced by the prospects and empathize with them while identifying the right set of solutions.
Since lead qualification is also an essential part of the sales process along with nurturing, the understanding of ideal buyers will help specialists disqualify leads that are not the right fit due to multiple reasons such as budget constraints or the lack of decision-making rights.
8. Networking Skills
The success of sales is largely dictated by referrals and customer retention. The lead generation specialist needs to have adept networking skills so that they know how to connect with the right people and leverage their network at the right time.
This means the lead generation professional can ask their network to refer to people who might need their offerings. Similarly, when it comes to customer retention, they know how to retain existing clients and identify potential upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
9. Analytical Skills
In the age of data-driven marketing, it is essential for every marketing and salesperson to have analytical skills. Lead generation specialists need to know the average time it takes to convert a lead into a deal, the number of follow-ups required to do that, the average size of a sale, etc.
When talking from the funnel standpoint, they should know how long it takes for a lead to enter the next stage of the funnel, the drop-off rate, and the conversion rate.
Having an understanding of these important metrics will enable them to focus on the right leads.
10. Targeting and Segmentation
When it comes to lead nurturing and personalizing the customer experience, the lead generation professional needs to be on point with their understanding of targeting and segmentation.
This requires you to know the buyer’s journey and the sales funnel so that you can correlate with each stage. When you know the stage of the buyer’s journey the lead is in, you can personalize the content and communication accordingly to help them qualify for the next stage of the funnel. When you are automating this process through CRM or email marketing, you can segment the audience based on the stage of the funnel and communicate accordingly at scale.
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Job Description: Lead Generation Specialist
Here is a sample job description for the role of lead generation specialist. Since this role differs from company to company, you can expect some changes in job responsibilities.
Job Responsibilities: What You’ll Do
1. Lead Management: You’ll be responsible for generating and nurturing leads for the organization using different marketing channels. Here are the detailed tasks:
1. Generate new leads using cold calling, email marketing, social media, and other relevant marketing channels
2. Classify hot, warm, and cold leads based on their need, budget, and decision-making capabilities. Accordingly, take the necessary steps to convert hot leads and nurture warm and cold leads
3. Organize and keep the lead status updated in the CRM software
2. Sales Management: Perform the following sales activities:
1. Understand how the sales process works and manage the sales pipeline
2. Participate in webinars, in-person events, conferences and network with peers and target audience to identify sales opportunities
3. Research: You’ll be required to research the target market during the lead generation activities:
1. Understand the pain points faced by the prospects during communication. Identify if they’re looking for specific features
2. Check for competitor products mentioned/used by leads and prospects during communication and the intent behind using them
4. Communication Skills: You should be aware of the following communication practices while interacting with leads:
1. Interact professionally with leads, existing customers, and other company stakeholders via various communication mediums
2. Collaborate with marketing and sales team members to work on tasks relevant to lead generation
3. Cultivate in-depth product knowledge and understanding to ensure that you can effectively communicate the product features, use cases, and benefits to the prospective customers
4. Follow company decorum at all times when representing the organization
Sample Requirements: What Companies are Looking for
1. 3-5 years of experience in lead generation and prospecting
2. Experience in B2B/B2C sales, preferably in for at least 1-2 years
3. Top-notch verbal and written communication skills
4. A proven track record of building and maintaining strong client relationships
5. Excellent project management skills
6. Thorough knowledge of CRM software
7. Excellent client servicing skills
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Closing Thoughts
We hope this article will help you guide on how to go about exploring career opportunities in the field of lead generation. We’ll be honest, the role of lead generation specialist is filled with challenges like any sales role, but the sooner you build the right skill set, the easier it’ll be for you to perform. It also helps to develop an understanding of other areas of marketing and sales and evaluate how you can integrate them in your role to give it a boost.
Do you have any questions related to the role of a lead generation specialist? Tell us in the comments below. For the latest news and trends update in the world of marketing, follow us on TwitterOpens a new window , FacebookOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .