Adopt 2 Simple Steps to Overcome B2B Lead Generation Challenges

Organizations should not spend their valuable time on unqualified leads. And while cold calling may or may not work in todays’ times; marketers are using incredible channels to reach out to prospects and the best ones are those that align with your business goals.

Lead generation will remain a challenge if one doesn’t identify the right audience.  However one need to adapt to the changing ways in acquiring the best leads as there are better ways and methods to engage and a get good leads.

Warm and well qualified leads always make for a good lead conversion rate. It also gives the sales team more time to focus on lead generations strategies and goals that can help enhance the ROI. It’s natural for companies with mature and sensible lead generation practices to have greater sales results.

Here are some of the most common challenges faced by companies when it comes to generating leads:

• Having longer sales cycle
• Lack of lead tracking activity by sales teams
• Lack of insights of knowing where the client exists in the sales funnel
• Lack of coherence and collaboration between the sales and marketing teams
• Immeasurable results or lack of accountability of previous lead generation campaigns
• Unrealistic timelines set or required to convert the leads
• Poor identification of prospects
• Bad state of data or unclean data usage

So how does one navigate through most of the above challenges and what practices can one adopt to overcome the lead generation challenges:

Data comes first:

Each stage of lead generation is important, but if your data is not sorted, no matter how much you leverage your lead generation skills; it won’t deliver what you need. There is a whole lot of data science involved and it’s all about how you use data cleansing and appending to leverage the best contact information. This will perpetuate your efforts to contact the right audience at the right time for best results.

Data audit is one of the most important parts of b2b sales and marketing. So how often do you perform audits for data hygiene, data standardization, data overlays, and data appending? These are activities that need daily attention and need to be taken seriously.

If you are commonly facing challenges such as having data in separate silos, having out-dated and stale data that is irrelevant, incomplete data or data that is not verified or lack of in-house skills to treat data; its time you either start taking data seriously, or hire an agency that does the data work for you. In any case it will definitely reflect on your lead conversion results.

Align strategies with your business goals:

One of the most significant and important factors that affect lead generation is whether or not your sales strategies are aligned with your business goals. This one might seem like an obvious one; but it’s far more important than one can imagine.

It is the foundation of why you do and what you do. If your sales and marketing teams are well aligned and have set some common goals regarding the quantity and quality of leads, then you will always have the right MQLs to be pushed ahead into the sales funnel and the sales team will find it easier to convert the SQLs.

Conclusion:

When it comes to b2b lead generation; none of the strategies work in silos; it has to be a comprehensive, cohesive and data rich strategy that can bring you the desired results.