For businesses that sell products, goods, and deliver services to B2B customers, having an effective sales lead generation strategy is essential for surviving – and thriving – in the corporate world. To gain a competitive advantage, you will need to have a toolbox filled with high-impact, low-budget sales and marketing tactics.

Polls have consistently shown that most companies, regardless of size and budget, face the same universal challenges in B2B marketing. Many corporations identified weaknesses in the areas of generating leads, improving quality of leads, and increasing awareness of their products and services. One of the main problems, however, is that all companies are unique, and what works for one organization might not be the best for the next. To reach the top of your field –and stay there – you will need to develop customized, targeted, and focused marketing strategies.

In today’s technology-centric world, successfully attracting and retaining clients requires that businesses know how to use sales and lead generation techniques, multimedia, social media, and web-based marketing – the end game being to help bolster sales. Within these categories, marketing experts and B2B sales professionals have identified outbound marketing (including telemarketing and virtual/ electronic sales); event marketing (such as tradeshows, seminars, and webinars); and web-based marketing, (which includes email newsletters, landing pages, search marketing, and content marketing); all considered to be the most effective techniques.

All of these are great components to a marketing campaign – but these are lead generation techniques, not closing techniques. You can have the most robust social media strategy and presence in your vertical, and that helps nurture prospects along, and keep you top-of-mind, but when it comes to selling to a B2B audience, you’re going to need to go the distance. Eventually you’re going to need to suck it up and make the call, or bring the lead in to your sales rep’s who can close the loop and bring the relationship offline and into a real-world scenario.

A B2B selling proposition is vastly different than a B2C offering. You need to establish trust, prove value, and work (often) hand-in-hand with your prospect to sell your offering. Social is a great place to foster relationships and even source new ones, and content is wonderful for warming up your prospect, but at the end of the day, if you’re selling anything that has a market value of over a few hundred dollars, you’re going to need to win your savvy business prospects heart. The best way to do that is still person-to-person; over a call or in person – either way, get out there and start putting names to faces.

How do you close-the-loop with your prospects and bring them offline? Let us know in the comments what you think the most effective relationship-building techniques are, and how you’re closing sales in 2014.

—Sam