Ensuring a continuous leads pipeline is a Sisyphean task – never-ending and often tedious. A recent report by ViB Tech found that lead generation is the top challenge for 41% of B2B marketers in 2024. This explains why 46% of B2B marketers cited lead quality and conversation rate improvement as their main priority, according to the same report.
To stay ahead of the game with consistent lead generation, B2B marketers must find quality leads, qualify them, and find out where the leads are on the buyer’s journey. This requires immense resources and effort from both sales and marketing teams. It takes valuable time away from building thought leadership, boosting brand awareness, nurturing leads, closing deals, and growing professional relationships – all of which are key to making sales.
This is where lead generation services like ME Matchmaking come in – taking over the repetitive, tedious tasks of finding and qualifying leads while providing wider benefits like scheduling meetings and branding opportunities.
When used in tandem with standard marketing strategies like content and email marketing, lead generation tools can be a boon to an organization.
Here are four reasons to invest in a lead generation service:
1. Saves time and money
On average, 60% of B2B marketers report wasted time and resources from unsuccessful lead generation campaigns (Marketing Profs). In fact, only about 22% of organizations surpassed their target for leads generated (ViB), despite the same or higher marketing budgets for 73% of organizations in 2024 (Marketing Profs).
On the sales side, sales professionals require an average of eight cold call attempts before reaching a prospect. Additionally, sales professionals only spend 34% of their time on actual selling (HubSpot). The rest of their time is taken up by research, writing emails, updating data, and scheduling meetings and calls.
A good lead generation service can increase quality leads in your marketing pipeline while saving sales and marketing teams valuable time in the initial phase of the process by:
- Conducting initial prospecting to find the best leads.
- Performing thorough research and qualification to narrow down the best leads.
- Maintaining and updating a database of leads.
- Scheduling meetings and calls with an organization’s target prospects.
This enables B2B marketers to focus on building brand awareness and thought leadership while allowing sales teams to refine their sales pitch and nurture existing leads.
“The meetings are booked in our schedule every other week, and we have time to prepare and do follow-ups, it allows us time to nurture leads.”
Business Development Director, Keto Software
2. Improves lead quality
Speaking of lead qualification, 40% of sales professionals struggle with lead quality while prospecting (ZoomInfo). This is disappointing given how time-consuming the manual process of prospecting can be. Although buying a leads database could be a short-term solution, these databases may have outdated or incorrect information on job titles, company size, and email addresses, among others. Quality is simply not guaranteed.
On the other hand, a lead generation partner can:
- Handle data cleanup and qualification to ensure that only the most promising leads make it down the sales funnel.
- Provide direct access to the right decision-makers who are uniquely interested in the solutions your organization provides.
- Curate a list of prospects tailored to your organization’s target group and buyer persona.
“ME Matchmaking is really good at finding these executives that are otherwise hard to reach. That’s why it’s been a very attractive service to us.”
Marketing Director, IFS Nordics
“With Management Events, we can really pinpoint the organizations we want to talk to and people the people we want to meet.”
SVP of Sales & Marketing, Solita
3. Enables nurturing of lasting relationships with prospects
Nurturing strong professional relationships is commonly agreed to be a cornerstone of the sales and marketing process. A HubSpot report found that 82% of sales professionals find it the most crucial aspect of the sales process. Developing and maintaining relationships with prospects will continue to pay off over time.
An effective lead generation provider handles all the legwork at the beginning of the sales process and empowers B2B sales professionals and marketers to focus on building trust and nurturing relationships with prospects, turning them into valuable business partnerships.
As a lead generation partner, ME Matchmaking will:
- Schedule and book virtual 1-to-1 meetings throughout the year with new prospects from your target market.
- Provide a well-researched profile, with information like investment priorities and budget, for each lead that you can access to help with relationship building.
- Provide avenues for networking directly with decision-makers at exclusive events.
“Management Events is one of the networks we use as a first connector to meet the right people, it’s great that we can meet people all year long.”
Senior Manager, Field Marketing, Northern Europe, OutSystems
4. Provides opportunities to boost brand visibility
Brand awareness is often cited as a key factor in effective B2B marketing, taking up more than half the budget for 57% of B2B marketers (InboxInsight). Whether it’s content marketing, email advertising, or building thought leadership, B2B markers understand that boosting brand visibility will lead to improved conversion rates.
This is supported by an Edelman and LinkedIn study which found that 75% of decision-makers say that thought leadership has led them to investigate products and services they were not considering before.
A lead generation service doesn’t only provide leads, but also opportunities for boosting brand awareness to thousands of top decision-makers in Europe, both online and offline.
The service includes:
- Opportunities for increased brand visibility at exclusive in-person and virtual events all year round.
- Building thought leadership via roundtable discussions, keynote sessions, and forums with top executives.
ME Matchmaking: The Best of Hybrid Lead Generation
Gone are the days of struggling with cold calls and emails. A lead generation service like ME Matchmaking is an effective and proven way to get high-quality leads, grow brand visibility, and meet directly with Europe’s top CxOs.
Update your lead generation strategies today!