International Inbound Lead Generation

INTERNATIONAL

INBOUND LEAD GENERATION

The 10-step process for becoming a thought leader within

your subject matter domain and how to use this position to

drive quality traffic from all over the world to your web site.

by Hans Peter Bech

International Inbound Lead Generation

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© Hans Peter Bech, May 2022

First edition

Unless otherwise indicated, Hans Peter Bech copyrights all materials on these pages. All

rights reserved. No part of these pages, either text or images may be used for any purpose

other than personal use. Therefore, reproduction, modification, storage in a retrieval system

or retransmission, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, for

reasons other than personal use, is strictly prohibited without prior written permission.

The business model framework is distributed under a Creative Commons license from

Strategyzer AG and can be used without any restrictions for modelling businesses.

Published by TBK Publishing ® (a division of TBK Consult ApS), CVR: DK27402917

www.tbkconsult.com/publishing

ISBN: 978-87-93116-55-9

TBK-WIPA-037


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Table of contents: TARGET AUDIENCE ............................................................................................ 4

ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... 4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................... 4

TOP-OF-FUNNEL LEAD GENERATION IS THE HOLY GRAIL .............. 5

A TITLE AWARDED BY YOUR READERS .......................................................... 6

THE TWO MAIN APPROACHES .................................................................. 7

THE 10-STEP PROGRAM FOR BUILDING YOUR POSITION AS A

THOUGHT LEADER ............................................................................................. 8

1. SELECT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE ..................................................... 9

2. LEARN HOW YOUR CUSTOMERS BUY .............................................. 10

3. CREATE QUALITY CONTENT .................................................................. 11

4. BUILD A BLOG ........................................................................................... 13

5. ENRICH YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE ..................................................... 14

6. POST AND ENGAGE REGULARLY .................................................... 15

7. FOLLOW YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS ....................................... 17

8. INCREASE YOUR 1ST LEVEL NETWORK ....................................... 18

9. INTERACT ........................................................................................................ 19

10. TAKING THE CONVERSATION OFFLINE ...................................... 20

ORGANIZATIONAL REQUIREMENTS ............................................................... 21

CONTENT PRODUCTION OR CREATION. ......................................................................................... 22

POSTING AND ENGAGING ............................................................................................................................. 22

LANGUAGES AND LOCAL ENVIRONMENTS ...................................... 23

TIME TO IMPLEMENT .......................................................................................... 23

ABOUT THE AUTHOR .......................................................................................... 24


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Target audience

The target audience for this e-book is anyone who works with revenue generation in the

software industry.

Abstract

This e-book is about top of funnel international lead generation for B2B software with

long sales cycles when you do not have a big budget.

It explains how you can design, implement, and operate an organic thought leadership

program that enables potential customers to find and engage with you.

The program will also help you move traffic through the funnel, but the prime objective

of this e-book is to discuss how it can generate awareness and interest at the top.

Author

Hans Peter Bech, M.Sc. (econ.)

Acknowledgements

The e-book is based on content originally published as a webinar organised and

produced by YASAD, the non-governmental organization representing the software

sector in Turkey.

Thank you to Gönül Kamali for hosting and producing the webinar and to Burak Neslitürk

from Qualified ONE for the moderation.

The proof reading has been performed by Emma Crabtree, ecr@tbkconsult.com.

Illustrations, design and lay-out comes from the hands of Jelena Galkina, info@kompot.ee

Top-of-funnel lead generation is

the holy grail

If you do not fill the funnel at the top, then nothing comes out at the bottom.

That is stating the obvious, but it does explain why so many business software companies

have a hard time delivering on their budgets not to speak about fulfilling their potential

and ambitions.

How do you generate an increasing number of leads when you do not have access to a

big budget? And how do you generate leads from foreign markets? Leads that can become

customers and then make the basis for setting up permanent international operations.

These are the key questions when your product has international potential, the potential

customers are unaware of your existence, and they don’t buy your type of product very

often.

The core of the challenge is that you must develop awareness and build a relationship

before they will consider you a viable vendor. As the buyer’s journey may take years, you

must be persistent, patient and economise your funds.

This e-book will give you the recipe for how you can organise and execute a lead generation

program that doesn’t require a big budget.


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A title awarded by your readers

The 10-step shoestring approach is based on a simple principle:

What you have in abundance, what is in high demand, and which is unrelated

to your limited budget is your insight.


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Industry Challenges

You know and understand the issues, problems, challenges, and opportunities that your

customers have within the domain where you operate. You know the difficulties they face

with managing the change from their current modus operandi to a situation based on

your category of software. You understand the value that your type of solution can release

and how to make it happen. That insight is something your potential customers all

over the world would like to learn from if only they knew you existed and if you shared

your wisdom in a non-propaganda and product-agnostic type format.

I admit that the term thought leadership is misused. Doing a simple search on LinkedIn

returns over 100,000 people in my immediate network (1st, 2nd and 3rd level) that use

the term thought leader to describe themselves. A quick look reveals that most of them

don’t share any leading thoughts on their LinkedIn profiles or anywhere else for that matter.

They claim to be thought leaders, but it doesn’t show.

If you follow my advice, then you do not need to self-inflate. Instead, you establish a

schedule for researching, thinking, documenting, and sharing your thoughts and insight -

generously. The key objective is to make others consider you a thought leader or a trustworthy

industry authority, and that doesn’t require any self-inflation.

Rather the opposite.


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The two main approaches

THERE ARE TWO MAIN

APPROACHES FOR

GENERATING LEADS:

1. YOU FIND THEM

2. THEY FIND YOU

This e-book explains how you design, implement, and operate a program that enables

potential customers to find and engage with you. It’s a category 2 approach. It will make

them find you.

The program will also help you move traffic

through the funnel, but the prime objective of

this e-book is to explain how it can generate

awareness and interest at the top.

I have divided the program into ten steps so that

they can be implemented chronologically.


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The 10-Step Program for Building Your Position as a Thought Leader


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Organisational requirements

What kind of resources and organisation does the method require?

Any company selling B2B software-based solutions need these functions to achieve

predictable and scalable revenue generation processes.

THERE ARE TWO MAIN TYPES

OF ACTIVITIES REQUIRED:

1. DEVELOPING AND PRODUCING

THE CONTENT

2. POSTING AND ENGAGING ON

SOCIAL MEDIA ESPECIALLY

ON LINKEDIN

The activities related to lead generation will take place primarily in marketing, sales

development, and sales.

Content production or creation

You will need someone, internally or externally, that can plan and produce the content.

This resource belongs in the marketing department.

You can have several part-time people allocated, but in total I believe the minimum

should be a budget for a full time equivalent.

You will probably leave video and podcast productions to external parties, but with

today’s technology you can easily do it all in-house.

Posting and engaging

Posting and engaging should be done by the marketing department, by the sales development

representatives and the account executives. You want the SDRs and AEs to own

the relationships, so it makes sense that they drive the communication with the potential

customers from a certain point. You need to agree on when and how the handover from

marketing to SDR to AE happens.

You will also need to train and coach your marketing and salespeople – both SDRs and

AEs - on how to use social media, especially LinkedIn.

I don’t think that posting and engaging should require any additional resources, but it

does require that your staff learn new skills.


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Languages and local environments

What about languages? Do you need to make the content available in more languages?

That depends on the type of product you are offering.

If you for example want to sell ERP systems in Germany, then you need to communicate

in German. If you want to sell CRM in France, then you need to communicate in French.

In general, you can say that the more local competition you face and the smaller the

companies you sell to are the more you are required to communicate in the local language.

If what you offer is not readily available elsewhere and you sell to bigger or specialised

companies, then my recommendation will be to start with English.

There are more than a billion people in the world using English as their first or second

language. There are people in all countries that read and understand English. The more

niche your product is the more likely it is that English will get you a long way.


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Time to implement

How long will it take to get the 10-step method implemented?

From the time that you have your content production in place I would say three months.

You should aim at releasing one new article, podcast, video, e-book or some other format

each week. Remember that some of these assets are reformatting of the same content,

so publishing once a week should be possible.

About the author

Hans Peter Bech is an Amazon bestselling author. He is a frequent blogger on how to

make information technology companies global market leaders and has written several

books and numerous whitepapers on international business development in the

IT industry.

Hans Peter also facilitates workshops for the TBK Academy® and is an advisor for

governments and companies. He holds a M.Sc. in macroeconomics and political science

from the University of Copenhagen.


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