Networking? It isn't a lead qualification strategy. Here's why you need a pre-sales strategy.

Sharing business cards over a glass of wine. Giving your elevator pitch at industry events. Following up on a connection request on LinkedIn. Whatever the format, professional networking has always been foundational to the B2B space. This isn’t without reason. Whether traditional or technology-led, networking can be a powerful tool to promote your brand, attract talent, and crucially, generate leads. Nevertheless, networking is only phase one. It’s lead generation, sure, but not a lead qualification or conversion strategy.

You might have a box brimming with business cards after a day of networking, but how do you turn each one into relevant, highly qualified prospects and meaningful discussions? Do you flow them through a marketing funnel or direct them straight to a sales call? Somewhere along the line, you need to understand their needs, expectations, and specific pain points to not only qualify them, but well and truly understand their appetite for your value proposition.

Yes, networking offers a lot of potential in the form of lead generation – but this only means something if you’re clear what comes next. (Essentially, if you can activate a pre-sales strategy that allows your teams to quickly qualify a lead and set them on the right journey). Keep reading for our thoughts on networking as a lead generation strategy, getting the most from your efforts, and easing any disconnect between marketing and sales with a pre-sales strategy.

In the B2B world, networking certainly has its place

Professional networking has many benefits, tangible and intangible. From a lead generation perspective, here are three of the most compelling.

Accelerate awareness

Networking allows you to connect with potential clients one-on-one from the get-go. You have a very real opportunity to catapult leads to the awareness stage of the sales pipeline, despite it requiring little marketing spend and few touch points. This can be invaluable, particularly for start-ups and SMEs with or without a sophisticated marketing.

Gather audience insights

Whether through face-to-face conversations or social listening on platforms like LinkedIn, networking lets you gather intelligence about your target audience. How are industry-wide pain points evolving? How are buying and decision-making processes changing? What strategies are your competitors using successfully? A room full of professionals is a room full of intelligence.

Increase client referrals

By connecting with decision-makers across multiple industries and global markets, you may increase the referrals coming your way. With the leads generated through customer referrals making up the best quality leads for more than 66% of sales professionals (Hubspot), there’s a strong argument for connecting with businesses that can advocate for you.

Ultimately, networking offers you raw data. Maybe it’s a LinkedIn address, a phone number, or simply a name and a job title. You can fill your pockets with these tasty titbits and uncover a lot of sales potential through networking, but it’s not a rock-solid lead qualification strategy. It’s only the first part of the puzzle.

Can you increase your networking’s net worth? B2B networking is a great tool for generating leads, but it’s only phase one. The next step is to qualify & nurture them with a pre-sales strategy.

The next challenge is to qualify your leads. To put it bluntly, you want to make sure that pursuing a lead outside of the networking sphere is worth the investment for your business.

Here are three considerations to make when generating and nurturing quality leads through B2B networking.

Connect with decision-makers

Are you networking with people with decision-making power? Are you building connections with people who can influence the buying process? Are you speaking to someone who understands the business’s pain points and desires? Even at this early stage, engaging with people who have the intel and authority to hold sales conversations with your account executives is crucial.

By connecting with decision-makers, you can dig deeper into a company’s needs and pain points. You can also determine their appetite for your value proposition before deciding if they need to enter a marketing flow or if they’re ready for a sales discussion.

Sieve your data for gold

Your next steps depend on the quality of data you’ve collected through networking. Here, you have a chance to uncover a lead’s pain points, preferences, and desires, albeit at a surface level.

You might even come away from a networking conversation with intel that eventually informs your first sales meeting. Maybe it’s from the IT director who mentioned their need for scalable solutions, or perhaps it’s from the procurement manager who hinted at compliance challenges.

You can also use this data to decide the most suitable next steps for the lead. Do they need to engage with your marketing to warm up, or could they benefit from heading directly to a sales discussion? To decide this, you need to understand what intel you do and don’t have and identify the best way of filling the gaps.

Activate your pre-sales strategy

Qualifying your leads isn’t an overnight process. Once you’ve identified someone who meets your qualification criteria, it takes time and skill to determine the next best course of action. You can accelerate the process, however, with a pre-sales strategy. This should bridge the gap between your marketing and sales priorities and help you guide an individual from lead to sales-qualified (SQL) lead status.

How you approach this will also depend on the role of the networker. For instance, let’s imagine that one of your marketing officers connects with a potential client at a business event. In another example, picture an account executive engaging with them. How might the lead’s journey from the networking event to your sales pipeline and beyond differ? With a clearly defined pre-sales strategy in place, you can make sure that the cogs turn towards a valuable discussion every time.

The crux of the matter is that lead generation, including networking, is only as powerful as your lead qualification and intelligence-gathering efforts allow it to be. It can be tempting to see B2B networking as your lifeline, especially as a start-up, but casting your net is only worth your resources if you know what to reel in and what to leave behind.

Let Pure Business Development help with the heavy lifting

Implement a pre-sales strategy that allows you to nurture high-quality leads and reduce the risk of sales rejection with Pure Business Development. By becoming a part of or an augmentation to your marketing and sales teams, we’re here to help you accelerate prospects along your pipeline and seize quality sales opportunities.

From qualifying your leads personally to equipping your account executives with the most relevant intel, we go beyond consultancy. We’ll bring in a highly effective and proven pre-sales strategy, so you can spend more time face-to-face with qualified prospects. It’s a win-win.

See our strategy and solutions here.

We’re ready and waiting to get started. Get in touch, lets see if we are a good fit.