What Are The Top Trends In Lead Generation For 2018?

The people at Cience requested I answer this question on Quora so I want to take this seriously and create an episode from the answer:

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First, let’s define “Lead Generation”:

Lead generation describes the marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing sales pipeline. Lead generation often uses digital channels, and has been undergoing substantial changes in recent years from the rise of new online and social techniques. - marketo.com/lead-generation/

General Trends Most Articles Will Mention

1. Email will continue to be a top-source for B2B lead generation - “DemandWave’s 2017 State of B2B Digital Marketing report, in which email was listed as the top channel for lead generation.”
2. Search rankings will be more necessary to increase conversions from any lead gen campaigns - “2018 B2B Lead Gen Outlook report, SEO ranks second when it comes to the channel producing the largest volume of leads.”
3. Live events (conferences, speaking engagements, symposiums) will continue to be a source of quality B2B leads - “Bizzabo’s Event Marketing 2018 Benchmarks and Trends report confirms that 80% of the C-Suite (among 400 surveyed) see live events as critical to their company’s success.”
4. Account-Based Marketing will become more critical - “ABM is a strategy for growth by focusing on best-fit prospects and customers.” “More than 90% of B2B marketers acknowledge account-based marketing as either important or very important (SiriusDecisions).”

Now, to ensure we stay true to our expertise and provide actionable value in this discussion, we will focus on these key trends

1. Increased Regulations Force Higher Quality
2. A Shift From Bulk Data Providers To In-House Or Outsourced Data-Curation Providers
3. Sales Navigator Will Become More Necessary While LinkedIn Becomes Less Useful

Section 1 - An Increased In Regulations Will Force Higher Data Quality

A more strict legal environment roots out bad practices and rewards best practices...

Progression of this year’s GDPR regulations and how it will continue to impact sales/marketing efforts globally:

We cover GDPR quite extensively in previous posts and episodes, but here are some of the key concepts to keep in mind.

1. GDPR it impacts you regardless of your location as long you are processing data of EU persons or persons that located there.
2. To make your data collection compliant, you need to show a legitimate reason of having data on persons covered by the GDPR, which makes it very hard to buy leads lists so opt for ad hoc curated data. On top of that, only keep and maintain data that is accurate, necessary and for the duration for which it is required, and
3. Currently, the email and other direct marketing channels are left to be controlled by local regulation. Therefore, you must be mindful of Opt-In vs Opt-Out requirements across the different countries that you may be targeting.

*Note: B2C is optin only in the EU. B2B is yet-to-be-decided on whether it will be optin-only in the EU. We expect this decision to come in the next 6 months.

By 2019, you will see the implementation and enforcement of the ePrivacy regulation

ePrivacy will dictate the way online direct marketing is done (among other things) and will convert the entirety of EU to either an Opt-In or Opt-Out requirement zone in the context of B2B. B2C is already under Opt-In requirement.

Depending on the which way the European Council and the European Parliament go it will have profound impact on the way lead generation is done in EU and thereby for the rest of the world.

Section 2 - A Shift From Bulk Data Providers To In-House Or Outsourced Data-Curation Providers

Quick anecdote about my (Alex’s) experience with BookYourData and how they have increased their outreach to former clients like myself in the last few months, which tells me they could be attempting to gain the last bit of revenue from there pre-scraped dataset. This is speculative, but I had not heard from their reps in a long time so it tells me something has changed.

Near-real-time sales intelligence and prospect data will become more important and shift from being a point of differentiation to point of parity.

Companies will need to deploy in-house, sourced or bought solutions for collecting, standardizing and utilizing prospect data and sales intelligence for the following reasons:

• To better the timing of their outreach so that they have an edge over their competition.
• To create highly relevant messages.
• To provide value to the end recipient with the content of their message.

Let’s talk about this by highlighting an example.

1 - If you are supplying a sales team (say 10+ SDR’s and AE’s) with data (enriched or raw) you are going to require more operations and (internal/external) personnel:

Bulk-data providers like - D&B Hoovers, data.com, Zoominfo, Clearbit etc.

Example: You have been buying data from Zoominfo for years. Their business is to provide you verified data that meets your simple filters (geo, title, industry…). Your system is automated so this data enters your CRM and into your cold outreach sequences. Even though you are targeting US-only companies, one of the prospects in a recent set is a virtual team member based in Switzerland. They still match your filters, but as soon as they receive your cold email they report you to the Data Protection Authority for Switzerland. In this situation, you had not adjusted your data-gathering processes with your source post-GDPR and would be fined for this violation.

What we believe will change:

1. More processes and personnel to ensure you are not in breach of any international laws.
2. The cost of data will go up due to additions to the sub-processors’ time and reduced availability of data (as they must be compliant as well).
3. The quality of data will increase because providers need to create the data sets for the purpose of each customer.

2 - The agencies and entrepreneurs of the world gathering data for themselves and clients’ campaigns on an adhoc basis:

Tools operating in your browser to run automated scrapes or actions on LinkedIn or Sales Navigator - Hunter, Skrapp, anyleads, findthatlead…

These operate entirely on the layout of the profile. Any updates to LinkedIn profile layout breaks the tool or results in less-accurate data.

Example: You are an entrepreneur who has relied on tools like Hunter, Skrapp.io, anyleads.com, findthatlead… to source email addresses for cold outreach. This data was cheap if not free and easy to gain while these tools are iterating on their bots code to ensure they can pull the data from LI profiles. You have a new project requiring you to filter companies by industry and size to gather lists for email scraping. You find this impossible (as a filter) in regular LinkedIn so you are forced to hire a virtual assistant to gather profiles adhoc. Then, you load those profiles to your email scraping tool to try and find emails. Your results come back with a lower match-rate than usual, and then the support team from that tool sends you an email stating LI has made a change which has broken their tool and they are working on a fix.

What we believe will change:

1. Validation rates will drop (currently they are ~ 40-60% accurate)
2. More tools will experience service interruptions
3. This data will need more verification and enrichment

Section 3 - Sales Navigator Will Become More Necessary While LinkedIn Becomes Less Useful

LinkedIn’s revenue model is more reliant on Sales Navigator as users are increasingly relying on LinkedIn for personal branding or networking, and less on company promotions (ads). Their ad platform is proving to be expensive and not necessary for B2B brands (platforms like Quora, Adwords and even Facebook are better for B2B ads) which means more revenue most come from their other channels like talent solutions.

To move more users into Sales Navigator, LI is going to continue:

1. Increasing the features of Sales Navigator to make it more valuable.
2. Further-restrict LinkedIn for automations and fast-network expansion (by adjusting the code to make it difficult for the bots operating on top).
3. Limiting filtering and research criteria i.e. the company search options.

What is the difference between LinkedIn (the social network) and LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator?

The differences between tools working on LinkedIn vs those requiring you to have a Sales Navigator account.

The business model of LinkedIn is to push anyone leaning on it’s API for any lead info to signup for Sales Navigator account.

The data research a user can do on SN is more structured, granular, and robust (where SN shows you a larger data set on each person than LI)

How Sales Navigator users can benefit from SNAP:

LinkedIn’s approach to several different tools and trying to provide value to those users in automated integrations via API.

1. SNAP (Sales Navigator Application Platform)
2. SNAP Partners

Example: These integrations allow you to automate the audience building on the paid ads platform based on leads in your CRM and the status of those leads. As in, if you have a campaign running in LinkedIn, and need to add prospects from a previous event you help who only exist in your CRM.

Final recap of changes to LinkedIn which will affect lead generation:

1. User knowledge of privacy settings will increase which will prevent more automated connection requests from sending (‘this user requires you to know their email to send request…’).
2. The flood of automations annoys users resulting in reduced acceptance of connections and more blocking.
3. LinkedIn will further-restrict the filtering capabilities as well as the number of connection requests a free account may send per day/month.

Changes to Sales Navigator

1. Increased number of integrations via the SNAP (CRM’s, analytics, marketing softwares…).
2. LinkedIn will reduce the cost of Sales Navigator.
3. Increase number of filters available to further granulize research.
4. Monetization of data by up-selling profiles which are in 3+ degrees.

Linkedin’s Filters (notice the limitations like company size):

Sales Navigator’s Filters (notice the additional filters):

In conclusion

One of the major trends in lead generation is going to surround on account-based marketing which requires focus on higher data quality where companies that are able to generate high quality data and remain compliant with the legal frameworks will have a definitive edge over companies that are not acquiring high quality data.

Successful lead generation will be more and more reliant on value provision, relevance and timing.

The tools companies are deploying for the lead generation activities will need to be integrated with other relevant tools or they will be replaced by tools more capable of supporting single use cases.

Final thoughts from Alex

• One-to-one communication will become expected as more prospects receive it from your competitors.
• Conversion from these one-to-one cold conversations will rely more on validation of that your personal brand - not just the credibility of your company.
• Karan’s prediction is the sales person will need to become more of a thought leader as well - show they know about the service their company provides (not just know about it, but publish and build their brand around it).

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If you found this interesting? Please check out other episodes of the podcast:

The Marketing Automation, Data Quality and Compliance Discussion | Anchor - The easiest way to start a podcast