For industrial suppliers, the pursuit of qualified leads can be challenging and time-consuming. Many sales teams still lean heavily on cold calls — a tedious, low-conversion strategy that often results in wasted effort and flat-out rejection. But what if you could replace those fruitless hours of phone calls and emails with a stream of "warmed up" leads, complete with data on their interests and needs?
This is where pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and the actionable data it provides can change the game. By adopting a performance-based approach, you can stop paying for simple visibility and instead pay for genuine interest, ensuring your sales team only engages with prospects who have already demonstrated a clear need for your products or services.
The Problem: Why Cold-Calling Is a Waste of Time
While cold-calling might feel like a necessary tradition in the industrial space, it’s an inefficient use of valuable sales resources. For sales representatives, time spent on the phone with an unvetted prospect is time taken away from closing a deal with a qualified one.
Traditional advertising methods, such as paying for ad impressions, can suffer from a similar issue. Budget spent on passive views that may or may not translate to actual customer interest or engagement isn’t an effective strategy.
Here's why the old ways are inefficient:
Low conversion rate: Cold calls interrupt the prospect, catching them when they are not actively sourcing a solution.
Wasted budget: Paying for ad impressions means spending money on people who may not be in-market buyers.
No data around intent: You have no information on the prospect's immediate needs, making the conversation a shot in the dark.
A performance-based approach like PPC, however, ensures that you spend your marketing dollars only when an interested user takes a concrete action, like clicking your ad.
The Solution: Using PPC Data for Productive Outreach
The power of PPC advertising lies not just in driving traffic but also in the clear, quantifiable data it generates. PPC is a digital model in which you pay a fee only when a potential customer clicks your advertisement. This directly connects your advertising investment to a user’s action, providing your sales team with a crucial advantage: intent data.
When a prospect clicks your ad, they are signaling a genuine interest in your offerings. Seeing what content they clicked on can give you an idea of which of your products or services they are interested in. This means your sales team is no longer making a cold call; they are following up on a prospect who has already initiated the engagement process.
Here is how PPC data transforms your sales outreach:
Measurable ROI: PPC allows you to track spending, clicks, and conversions, making it easy to calculate your return on investment and justify your budget.
Precision targeting: You can target specific keywords, industries, or demographics, ensuring your ads are seen by in-market buyers who are actively sourcing.
Personalized conversations: The data generated by PPC ads tells you what the prospect was searching for when they clicked your ad. Your sales team can use this insight to have a more relevant, personalized, and productive conversation, dramatically increasing the likelihood of conversion.
PPC allows you to drive traffic and leads almost instantly, offering a fast track to market visibility, unlike long-term strategies like search engine optimization (SEO).
What Sets Thomasnet's Performance-Based Listings Apart
Many platforms utilize PPC, including search engines and social networking platforms. However, Thomasnet’s Performance-Based Listings (PBLs) are specifically designed for industrial sourcing, making them a highly effective solution for suppliers.
Thomasnet’s Performance-Based Listings differ from PPC placements on Google and other platforms because Thomas brings more than 125 years of experience connecting industrial suppliers and buyers. This means the traffic you receive is already highly qualified, increasing the chances of turning a click into a lead.
The Thomasnet PBL program's unique pricing model also sets it apart:
Pay only for engagement: With Performance-Based Listings, a supplier is charged only once per user session for all clicks on their profile, website, catalog, or video within that session. If a user clicks multiple profile attributes during one session, suppliers are only charged once.
Dedicated industrial audience: You can define your target audience by selecting from more than 80,000 industry-specific categories on Thomasnet. Seeing which category a lead clicked on can help you understand what they’re looking for and reach out with additional information related to their sourcing needs.
Budget alignment: You choose the budget that matches your goals, and Thomasnet’s algorithm drives high-quality traffic to your listing based on relevance and your specified spending limit.
By leveraging Performance-Based Listings, you can stop paying for passive views and start investing in qualified engagement from in-market industrial buyers.
Ready to Maximize Your ROI?
Industrial suppliers can transform their sales process by moving away from inefficient cold calls and toward a data-driven PPC strategy. Performance-Based Listings on Thomasnet put you in control of your budget while ensuring every dollar attracts an engaged, qualified buyer. It's time to equip your sales team with "warmed up" leads and achieve a measurable return on your marketing investment.
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