High quality lead generation was by far the top marketing challenge cited by organizations surveyed for the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.

In 2009, 69 percent of organizations surveyed said that generating high quality leads was a top challenge; in 2010 it rose to 78 percent of organizations. A similar jump occurred in “generating a high volume of leads,” which went from 35 percent of organizations in 2009 to 44 percent in 2010.

Many professional service firms have a scatter-shot approach to lead generation. They put information into the world through newsletters, direct mail, e-blasts, trade shows and other stuff in hope that it falls on the right people at the right time. If you throw enough information out there, you can get limited success. But should you really spend precious money to blanket the world with information about your firm?

Two secrets of highly successful lead generation are these: know your ideal audience and know their pains.

Best Clients. Worst Problems. 

If you’re not excluding a lot of people from your list of potential “A” clients, you’re not being strategic enough. Review the last few years of financial data for your firm, and identify which clients consistently bring your firm (or you personally) consistent revenue and great experiences.

Your best clients aren’t just the ones with the most money; they’re the ones who result in the most profit because:

• they value the work you do,
• your people enjoy working with them and are more creative,
• the work is something you do well, and
• the clients trust your team — and pay promptly.

These are the kinds of clients you want to clone — so these are the leads you want to generate. A common mistake is to think that it’s better to have 100 leads of any type than 10 leads of the best type. But 10 “A” client leads are far more valuable than 100 random names on a purchased list.

Identifying your best clients will save you money by eliminating marketing efforts that don’t reach that audience.

Your next step is to really understand what’s important to those clients and therefore the prospective clients or leads you’re hoping to reach. You can do this by conducting “A” client interviews and holding client highlighter meetings to identify pains and opportunities that align with services you most want to sell.

Connect with and observe your best clients on social media to see what they’re sharing, reading and talking about.

Think about the most recent problem you solved for one of your best clients. This client is not the only one who is grappling with this problem. Add the problem to your list of client pains that should be addressed in your marketing content.

Why Should They Buy From You?

In his book ‘UnMarketing,’ Scott Stratten gives the results of asking over 1,000 business owners, “Why do you buy?” When selecting a new service provider, most owners cited “a referral by a trusted source” at the top of the list. Right behind that was “current relationship, but have yet to purchase.”

Those are the prospects that have learned about you and started to trust you through your expert nurturing of that relationship. Even better, the third top answer in the survey was “recognized expert in the field,” which is another form of lead generation/nurturing.

This information might not seem new, given that many service providers get their best clients through referrals or a trusted relationship. However, how those leads come to you are changing.

Bio pages on firm websites consistently rank as one of the most highly viewed pages on professional service websites. Those warm prospects are checking out your people before they make the decision to call. If, in viewing that bio page, they also find a client story, an article on a key industry topic, a downloadable tips list or informative blog post, those prospects are wooed into staying longer on your site and learning more about your expertise. You are nurturing them to look further and find out why your people are the best choice.

Once they’re on your website, get them to do something! Missing that opportunity is like observing a customer in your retail store and never offering to answer a question, point that customer to the right aisle or invite her to sample something.

Really? You’re going to let them window shop and leave?

Referral sources also want to recommend the best option for their clients. Are you proving through your online brand, content and differentiating messages that you are the best? Some clients might just take a referral source on his or her word that you’re the best, but most are still going to decide for themselves based on first impression — first by what they’ve found out online and then in the initial meeting.

This isn’t just about telling leads why you’re different from your competition. If it was, everyone could win by saying “better quality,” “great service,” “leaders in excellence” and all the other overused phrases in the marketplace.

You need to prove that you know what you’re talking about by sharing industry insights, trends, tips and updates regularly and in the right channels. If you’re a fairly social, in-person networker, you do that through speaking, webinars, videos and tailored events — methods to get in front of your best prospects physically and with your voice and personality.

If you prefer a more thoughtful, behind-the-scenes approach, you have opportunities to write articles and case studies, blog posts and tips sheets. Distribute them in the channels where your audience hangs out as well as on your website. Draw them in for even deeper, more technical conversations, then warm them up for a real meeting.

Lead Them to Act.

Lead nurturing usually breaks down in one (or both) of two places: either you don’t have a good system that helps you follow up with leads, or you don’t have a system feeding you content that you can use to follow up.

Sometimes professionals don’t have good lead nurturing systems because they don’t know how to implement one. If that’s the case, good sales training with an eye toward the sales process as well as individual coaching on business development strategies can help create this system.

Make it easier for your prospects to act by making sure that every communication — whether in person, in print or online — guides them to take action. This doesn’t have to be a hard sell. You could invite them to ask or answer a question, fill out an evaluation, share their own insight, download a brochure or join your LinkedIn group.

Every time your prospects respond to an invitation, you can reach out with additional information. Thank them for their comments. Let them know about an upcoming webinar that relates to their pain. Ask if they would like a copy of a recent article written about their concern. The goal is to keep the conversation going in a way that is personal and focused on the prospect’s needs.

One of the biggest drawbacks to our content-rich world is that prospects and clients can come across information that is important to them — and you didn’t send it first. Embarrassing.

Your goal with lead generation and nurturing in the coming months and years is to become so good at sharing your expertise and knowledge to the right audience and in the right places that you become a preferred source of information. Prospects and clients turn to you first, share the information with their connections and practically build your business for you.

Converting prospects to clients is still about referrals and relationships, but in a new and dynamic context. You are the information hub. You are the experts. Start dangling those carrots of timely and useful information and invite people to take action.

In 2011, Altman Weil conducted a survey of chief legal officers and asked how they rated the efforts of new law firms to get on their radar. They picked a number between 0 (no effect) and 10 (extremely positive). Sadly, no individual effort got a 10, but here are the top contenders:

• Personal contact 6.7
• Free seminar, webinars, CLE 6.2
• Written material demonstrating legal expertise 6.1 
• Industry event sponsorship, presentations, attendance 5.8
• Committee work, community involvement, board memberships 5.0
• Website content, firm brochures, advertising 4.3
• Direct mail and email campaigns 3.8
• Directory listings and ratings 3.6
• Invitations to social events 3.3
• Social media activity 2.0

When the survey creators asked their CLO participants to identify and rate other efforts they found noteworthy, “spending time to understand our business” got a whopping 9.3 and “recommendations and reputation” scored 7.8 — both higher than personal contact.

You can see that personalized and educational information comes out on top — as do the service providers who sent it.