Enterprise leads are the gold standard of lead generation.
They bring in large ACV, provide your business with more social proof, and bring in more overall revenue.
But as with anything great in life, they don’t necessarily come easily.
Your typical lead gen strategy may not be enough when targeting the biggest fish. So if you want to grow your leads, it’s time to grow your strategy.
What Is Enterprise Lead Generation?
Enterprise prospects are what salespeople and marketers like to refer to as “the whale” of all leads. They are the Fortune 500 companies, the million-dollar (or even billion-dollar) companies with over 1,000 employees, they usually sign on for large contracts, and bring in the most ACV.
In other words, they are the crème de la crème of leads, and if you have the resources, you should absolutely be going after them.
Enterprise lead generation is the actual process of attracting and converting these large companies into consumers who have indicated interest in your product or service and, better yet, who may become actual paying customers.
Benefits & Challenges Of Enterprise Lead Generation
There are a host of benefits to closing an enterprise deal. Let’s take a look at a few below.
- Generates Large Amounts Of Revenue: Enterprise companies have deep pockets. That is, they have massive budgets and won’t hesitate to spend a lot of money in order to solve an important problem.
- Enhances Reputation Management: When you close a few Fortune 500 deals, people will start to take notice. Other potential customers will trust you more if they know that a Fortune 500 company trusts you with their business.
- Elevating Buying Journeys: Large companies are willing to pay the price for the high level of support they require, and they usually come to the table with clear and realistic expectations.
And while the payoff is certainly worthwhile, enterprise lead generation does not come without a set of challenges that salespeople and marketers alike have to work to overcome.
- Long Sales Cycles: Enterprise companies are big and they want to make sure they are getting best-in-class solutions. For that reason, they usually have longer sales cycles (6–18 months is typical), meaning you have to be on your game for an extended period of time in order to actually close the deal.
- Complex Sales Are … Complex: Enterprise companies usually come with many stakeholders and therefore many decision-makers that may have conflicting pain points.
- You Need A Lot Of Resources: Once you’ve won a deal, you need to make sure that you have the team and infrastructure in place to manage them effectively as a customer. Larger companies will need extensive onboarding and customer service to make sure things go smoothly. Just because you’ve won them, doesn’t mean you can’t lose them.
Why Do You Need An Enterprise Lead Gen Strategy?
If you have a product or service that you know can effectively help larger companies and organizations, then you need an enterprise lead gen strategy.
As you probably already know, the whole spray and pray method is outdated, and doesn’t really work today. You shouldn’t be targeting enterprise leads the same way you target SMB or startup leads, because their needs are drastically different.
So why bother with enterprise lead generation? Here’s why:
- More valuable accounts
- Increased monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
- Boosted brand equity
How to Generate Enterprise Leads
The name of the game when it comes to developing an enterprise lead generation strategy is account based marketing (ABM).
As we mentioned earlier, when conducting enterprise level sales, you’re typically not speaking to one person. You need to target large organizations as a whole entity, which is precisely where ABM comes in.
Below are a few best-practice tips and tricks for elevating lead generation efforts:
1. Identify And Target Strategic Accounts
When first starting with your enterprise lead gen strategy, a good starting place can be identifying target accounts and then crafting messaging that is catered to their pain points.
When identifying potential accounts, you should be familiarizing yourself with all of the existing players in the market, and look at their affiliations and networks with other companies. Then you can start to get more granular, and look at existing tech stacks, revenue, and other technographic information that can help you craft a targeted lead gen strategy.
2. Qualify The Leads You Already Have
The great thing about enterprise leads is that they can still come from traditional marketing channels such as web forms, trials, demo requests, whitepapers, eBooks, case studies, and any other channels you’re already using for lead generation. Many companies don’t realize that they in fact already have larger companies in their CRM databases, but fail to rank or score them effectively.
3. ABM For Targeted Outreach
ABM is the ideal approach for enterprise leads because marketers can create a list of organizations to target and then track how they interact with the digital content that’s shared with them. With predictive analytics and intent signals, marketers can deliver ads through IP addresses directly to stakeholders and decision makers.
4. Engaging Multiple Stakeholders
One of the main challenges of enterprise lead generation is appealing to the many, many decision makers. Ultimately, your goal is to try and make different stakeholders, from different departments, all understand the value that your product offers.
This involves creating content for a variety of different personas. And by nurturing those relationships, you can tweak messaging to appeal to different decision-makers.
5. Create Case Studies To Demonstrate Value
Enterprise decision-makers have a lot going on, which means that you need to demonstrate value right away. Case studies are one of the most efficient and effective ways to show them the power of your product/service, because they can see a real life example of how it helped a company similar to theirs.
Case studies can help move the sales process forward and can be easily shared with various decision makers.
6. Customize Your Demo And Solution
When targeting enterprise companies, personalization is key. They don’t have time to waste with generalizations. They want to know exactly how your product can help them achieve their very specific goals. Opportunities for personalization start with the initial demo, where you can create detailed mock-ups and reference specific examples of use cases. Since enterprise customers tend to be your most valuable in terms of revenue, it’s imperative that you hyper-personalize their experience in order to offer them the precision they’re truly looking for.
Entering The World Of Enterprise Lead Gen
As we always say, not all leads are created equal. And if you’re taking the same approach to obtaining all of them, you’re guaranteed to be missing out on the best of the best. In order to gain specific leads, you need to deploy a specific strategy that targets a wide range of decision makers.
Enterprise leads have large budgets, and are very cognisant of how they spend it. They require relevant examples, value props, and demos in order to understand the true value of your product/solution and whether or not it’s worth bringing into their already well established tech stacks.
They require a lot of work but in the end, they are certainly well worth it.