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Lead Generation for Waste Management: 5 Key Tools to Win Business, Even in a Crowded Market
Erika Carmichael
Introduction
Price wars, crowded markets, and monopolization by big brands can stagnate growth for up-and-coming waste management companies. Large enterprise organizations have the funds to blanket a territory with ads and salespeople, leaving little room for competitors to sneak in.
In places like this, traditional lead generation methods just don’t cut it anymore. Salespeople often struggle to meet quotas since customers are slow to change, and advertising dollars can quickly drain your budget.
To really succeed in a crowded market, you need to be strategic. You need B2B lead generation tools that provide insights into your territory and visibility into potential customers who are actively searching for waste management services.
If you’re trying to break into new territory and feeling the increased pressure to generate more leads, close deals faster, and stay ahead of your competitors, this article is for you.
Let’s dive in.
Understanding Lead Generation
Before we get to the tools, let’s talk about the lead generation process.
Lead generation is a two-part process that includes finding or attracting a potential customer and converting them into an “opportunity.”
Traditionally, this involves the creation of an ideal customer profile (ICP), doing lead research to find prospects that match your profile, and building a “target” list for outreach (but we’ll show you how to do this automatically).
Lead generation can be categorized into two types: inbound and outbound, both of which are essential tactics for a balanced strategy in the waste management industry.
- Inbound Lead Generation involves attracting potential customers who are actively searching for services through tactics like content marketing, SEO, and social media. Inbound allows prospects to find you organically, often when they’re already interested in what you offer.
- Outbound Lead Generation efforts involve your sales team actively reaching out to prospects who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). This approach includes cold calls, emails, direct mail, and advertising, which helps you connect with prospective customers who may not yet be actively seeking your services.
For waste management businesses, combining both inbound and outbound lead generation allows your team to capture leads effectively and fill the sales pipeline with qualified prospects.
But effective lead generation isn’t just about collecting contact information; it’s about building relationships with qualified leads, offering them valuable insights, and guiding them through the sales funnel until they’re ready to purchase.
But this can be very time-consuming unless you have the right tools.
Essential Tools for Lead Generation
To save time and succeed at lead generation, waste management businesses need the right mix of tools to identify, engage, and convert leads efficiently. Selecting the best lead generation software can help capture leads through various mediums such as ads, landing pages, chatbots, and webinars.
Different lead generation software can help identify, engage, and convert leads efficiently.
Lead gen software simplifies the lead generation process, allowing businesses to focus on core activities like providing products and services.
Convex is a powerful lead gen tool for waste management sales teams, offering features that streamline lead generation efforts.
Lead gen tools like Convex can perform time-consuming tasks nearly on autopilot, enhancing overall efficiency.
1. Property Intelligence Software
Convex (we’re Convex) is a powerful tool for waste management sales teams to identify commercial properties that are actively searching for waste removal services. Using our Signals tool, your sales team can skip time consuming tasks like prospecting and lead research, and go straight to connecting with qualified leads who’ve already shown an interest in your services.
The platform was specifically designed for commercial salespeople prospecting property owners and managers and comes equipped with tools to quickly identify qualified leads by providing property-specific data such as ownership details, permit history, and more. This lead generation tool allows you to streamline your sales process by targeting potential customers in need of waste management services.
Key Features of Convex:
- Property Intelligence: Access detailed data like building age, square footage, tenant information, ownership, and permit history.
- Atlas: Visualize property and contact data on a map, create lead lists, and sync customer data bidirectionally with your CRM.
- Signals: Identify prospects ready to buy with lead scoring based on buyer intent data.
- Engage: Reach out to high-priority prospects based on their signal strength.
- Generative AI: Send highly personalized emails or prepare phone scripts in just two clicks based on potential customers’ data as well as your own account and contact info.
- CRM Functionality: Track leads, assign stages, tag coworkers, and manage pipeline with integrated CRM tools.
This tool should be at the top of any commercial sales team’s list because it can perform the most time consuming tasks nearly on autopilot.
2. Customer Relationship Management Tools (CRM)
Managing relationships with your customers is vital for building trust, retaining clients, and ensuring long-term business growth. A CRM tool helps you organize customer data, track interactions, and streamline your sales processes. Here are two top CRM options to consider, depending on your budget and needs:
HubSpot CRM (Best for Limited Budgets)
Overview: HubSpot CRM is a powerful yet budget-friendly option for commercial roofing contractors looking to manage leads and customer relationships without breaking the bank. Its intuitive interface, free version, and seamless integration with HubSpot Marketing tools make it an excellent choice for businesses just getting started with CRM software.
Features:
- Contact and lead management
- Email tracking and templates
- Meeting scheduling tools
- Pipeline management and task automation
- Integrates with HubSpot Marketing for a complete solution
Salesforce (Feature-Rich- Especially if You’re Not on a Budget)
Overview: Salesforce is the industry leader in CRM tools, offering advanced features that allow businesses to handle everything from lead management to complex sales automation. If you have a larger budget and need a robust solution, Salesforce provides all the bells and whistles for managing customers at scale.
Features:
- Highly customizable sales pipelines
- AI-powered lead scoring and analytics
- Workflow automation and task assignment
- Integration with a vast marketplace of apps
- Advanced reporting and forecasting
Either one of these tools is perfect for building relationships with potential customers and managing the sales pipeline
3. Website Visitor Identification Tools
But there are times when someone comes to your site and doesn’t take action. If you’re not yet using Convex, Leadfeeder is powerful tool that helps businesses understand and engage with website visitors in real-time. It identifies companies that visit your website and provides detailed information about what pages they viewed. This allows you to reach out to them before they even contact you. Datanyze also leverages data and analytics to build targeted lists and connect with prospects faster. Both tools help turn website traffic into qualified leads by providing insights into the interests and needs of your target audience. Datanyze also offers built-in sales intelligence features that help you see firmographic data about a company.
4. Landing Page Creation and Lead Capture Tools
Unbounce and Instapage are two of the best landing page builder tools for waste management companies. They allow you to create custom landing pages and lead capture forms to attract and engage potential customers.
With these tools, you can offer special deals without changing your main website, and offer valuable resources and downloadable documents like waste management guides or free assessments in exchange for a prospect’s contact information.
5. Sales Process Automation and Email Marketing Tools
Zapier and IFTTT are essential for automating routine actions in your sales process. These tools allow you to automate follow-ups, add leads to your CRM, and even trigger actions across platforms based on specific events. By integrating them with your lead generation software, you can save time and focus on closing deals.
If you’re looking to automate email nurture campaigns and other aspects of email marketing, you may want to use platforms like Constant Contact and ActiveCampaign in conjunction with Zapier to take a few tasks off your plate.
Several tools can also help you capture existing traffic to your website and turn it into opportunities.
Live Chat Software and Live Chat Tools
“Live chat” tools are the little box on the bottom right corner of the screen when you go on a website. These are sometimes run by AI, and others are run by actual customer service and salespeople. In either case, they allow you to connect with website visitors in real time.
Two well known live chat tools like Intercom and Tawk.to. Intercom offers a variety of features, including chatbots and email integration, to ensure you never miss a lead. Tawk.to is a more affordable live chat tool that also helps convert visitors into qualified leads.
These tools allow you to grab the attention of site visitors and provide instant answers to questions or support functions.
Customer Insights and Customer Satisfaction Survey Tools
You may also want to survey your customers to improve their experience. Customer insights, survey, and satisfaction tools allow you to better understand your target audience and improve your customer relationships, SurveyMonkey and ProProfs Survey Maker allow you gather feedback and identify pain points, which can help you predict personality traits of your potential customers based on their online behavior.
These tools allow you to personalize your approach to their needs.
Calendar Scheduling Tools
Finally, if your customers engage your services by booking a meeting, you’ll want to include a scheduling tool on all of your online properties. Websites, social media, directories, and more.
It’s easy to simplify meeting bookings with tools like Calendly or Doodle, which both enable you to schedule sales calls with prospective customers.
These tools are especially useful for coordinating meetings with owners, facility managers, directors, or decision-makers at commercial properties because they can schedule a time that works for them and adjust the meeting time to meet their needs.
Choosing the Right Lead Generation Tool
Figuring out which lead gen tools to use can be tough! There are literally hundreds of choices, and the ones you choose will have a big impact on your business.
Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself when evaluating your options:
1. What’s your primary goal? Is it accelerating lead velocity? Capturing existing website or social media traffic? Or nurturing existing opportunities?
2. Features: Does the tool offer insights for identifying leads? Sending personalized messages to ideal prospects? Or, lead capture, email marketing automation, and CRM integration?
3. Support & Training: Are there resources available for understanding the tool? Does the platform offer FREE ongoing training? How easy is it to get help when needed?
4. Ease of Use: How intuitive is the tool? Will it be a steep learning curve for your team? Will they use it regularly if you purchase access?
5. Scalability: Will the tool grow with your business? Can you add more users or features as needed?
Now that you’ve assessed the platform itself, take a look at the pricing, ratings, and reviews.
- Pricing: Compare the paid plans and ensure they fit within your budget. Make sure that you take into account the potential return on investment (ROI) of a platform before making a decision. Sometimes a more costly solution will pay for itself, and help you accelerate revenue, so don’t count a solution out just because it doesn’t initially fit your budget.
- Customer Reviews: Look at feedback from other businesses on G2, Capterra, TrustPilot, and other rating and review platforms to help you understand what the overall experience will be like.
To give you an example, Convex is rated 4.7 out of 5 stars on Capterra for ease of use, and teams using Convex experience a 9x median ROI. (based on year-average estimates with a 95% customer retention rate and 45% profit margin.)
Doing this analysis will help you choose the solution that best fits your needs.
Implementing a Lead Generation Process
Now, here’s where the rubber meets the road. Once you’ve chosen lead generation tools, they’re no good unless you integrate them with your existing systems, train your team, and use them to their fullest potential.
Start with the “tip of the spear:” prospecting. Then, focus on your sales pipeline, lead management, and finally, email marketing tools to automate nurturing efforts. This will take tasks off your plate and allow you to focus on sales conversations or building the business itself.
Be sure to train your team, identifying power users who are getting great results and using their workflows and knowledge to create a feedback loop that allows everyone to use the tools effectively and maximize their potential.
Measuring the Success of Lead Generation
But just using them isn’t enough to ensure your lead generation process is successful on an ongoing basis; track metrics like revenue per channel or platform, lead volume, conversion rates, and overall revenue growth.
This will allow you to use the data from your lead generation software to identify areas of improvement and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Conclusion
Lead generation is key to overcoming the challenges of a saturated, competitive marketplace. To do this effectively, you need tools that can reach your target audience, gather relevant insights for sales, and ultimately make the entire sales process faster and more efficient.
As the market changes, so will your needs. So stay nimble, try new things, and refine your process as you learn what works best for your business.
Whether you choose to build your lead generation efforts on Convex, Leadfeeder, Hubspot, or Unbounce, having the right platforms in place will help you streamline your sales and marketing processes, attract new leads, and grow your revenue.
If you’re ready to take your lead generation efforts to the next level, Schedule a demo of Convex today to see how we can help you capture and convert more leads in less time.