Familiarize yourself with lead generation terms
When you’re getting started with lead generation, you should familiarize yourself with a variety of basic terms. Here’s a glossary of some basic lead generation and sales terms and definitions for your reference:
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Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU): Prospects that are at the bottom of the sales funnel and nearing a purchase.
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Budget, authority, need, and time (BANT): A method for qualifying likely sales prospects. You want to talk to people who have the budget, authority, need, and time for your product or service.
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B2B: Business-to-business.
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B2C: Business-to-consumer.
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Call-to-action (CTA): Asking a lead to take an action. A CTA often takes the form of a digital image that encourages a lead to move closer towards making a purchase.
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Click-through rate (CTR): A percentage of how many users actually click a link; a way of measuring the success of online or email sales campaigns.
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CMS (content management system): A computer system that allows users to publish and edit content from a single interface.
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Inbound marketing: A marketing strategy that earns the attention of customers, drawing them in to attract new business through content marketing, search engine optimization, social media, and more.
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Lead generation: The marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing a sales pipeline.
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Lead nurturing: The process of building relationships with qualified prospects, regardless of their readiness to buy.
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Lead scoring: The technique of assigning leads a score based on points given to a lead’s demographic attributes, behaviors, and web activity for the purpose of sending warm leads to sales.
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Middle-of-funnel (MOFU): Prospects in the middle stages of the sales funnel.
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Outbound marketing: The process of pushing your message out to customers through general advertising and other paid programs.
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Pay-per-click (PPC): An Internet advertising model where advertisers pay every time their ad is clicked by a user.
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Return on investment (ROI): The results gained for your dollars spent.
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Sales and marketing alignment: Collaboration between the sales and marketing team for common definitions of what constitutes a good lead and closed-loop lead lifecycles.
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Sales funnel: The progression that your company tracks while generating, qualifying, and closing leads throughout the sales and marketing lifecycle.
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Service-level agreement: A part of a contract where a service is defined.
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Top-of-funnel (TOFU): Prospects in the top or beginning stages of the sales funnel.
8 useful, and free, lead generation apps
Many applications and websites are available to test your lead generation techniques and strategies. From determining how to test a landing page, to seeing how your emails look on various devices, to seeing how well your website is optimized for keywords, free tools can help you do lots of things.
Take a look at this list to learn about eight useful and free lead-generation applications:
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Marketo’s Landing Page Split Calculator: Determine how many versions of a landing page you should create for your A/B test and how long the test should take to execute.
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Litmus Email Testing: Input your email HTML for a report on how your email looks on various devices and email clients.
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HubSpot’s Marketing Grader: This gives you a free report on how you are currently doing with your online marketing strategy.
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Check My Links: Check your website for broken links.
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My SEO Grader: Check your website to determine how well it is optimized for a specific keyword.
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A/B Split Test Significance Calculator: Check your A/B tests to determine if the results you get are statistically significant.
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Marketo’s Marketing Automation ROI Calculator: Calculate how to optimize your revenue cycle and evaluate your sales funnel.
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Click to Tweet: Add a Tweet This link into any of your blog posts or website content. Simply create the tweet you want your visitors to use and generate a link for easy social sharing.
