The 8 Major B2B Lead Generation Challenges And How To Overcome Them

Lead generation can be tricky. However, you need lots of leads to grow your business. Prospecting for the right tactics, implementing these tactics consistently, breaking through the noise and standing out to your prospects – are all skills needed in a successful lead-generation campaign. 

One of the best ways to start with lead generation is to identify common challenges faced by firms in your industry. Then, you can use these challenges as a springboard for creating effective strategies.

Challenges associated with generating leads

It’s easy for your sales pipeline to get blocked, no matter the reason. This can be frustrating and leaves sales reps with a never-ending challenge – generating quality leads. Listed below are some of the most common problems and solutions

1. Optimise the budget

Finding the balance between budget and desired lead volume is a challenge every team has to deal with. Maximise your return by tracking ROI for each channel and scaling to the most profitable sources before doubling elsewhere.

2. How you manage the warm leads makes all the difference

Good lead nurturing is a vital part of any lead generation process. Not all leads are ready to buy when you first contact them, so be sure to build a programme that will add value to your prospects and move them closer to purchasing. This will ensure you become a trusted advisor with whom they’ll want to do business.

3. Building the right team 

Marketers need to specialise in specific areas. And the team will only get larger when you have enough people to support each individual area. Even as the team grows, specific disciplines still require specialist knowledge that an external team can provide. And some parts of your business have so many moving parts that outside help could be beneficial.

There are many reasons why companies decide to outsource their lead generation efforts. It could be because of a lack of resources, expertise, or technical knowledge. Outsourcing is not an admission of failure; instead, it’s choosing the best tools for your business. One of the most popular prospects of outsourcing is sending email campaigns. It has many tech aspects- not just sending an email but picking the best time, writing a standout pitch and ensuring you send it to relevant targets. Copywriting is obviously crucial to making your campaign sound as enticing as possible so that people take the time to open it and look through it.

4. Producing content that is relevant.

Content marketing is currently one of the most popular lead generation options. Many people are having trouble creating the right content so they don’t suffer from any drops in traffic.

Creating content may not be challenging if you’re writing blog posts – WordPress reports that five million blog posts are published daily. The problem, however, is figuring out which content the audience wants to read. Work on that to find what best fits your audience.

5. Ensure that decision-makers see your marketing

Marketing budgets are often limited and targeted, so it’s vital to know who is in charge of the marketing decisions. One approach to targeting your messaging is mapping it to the sales funnel, meaning marketing managers looking for new products will be more likely to see your content.

Outbound marketing and prospecting can help get your business in contact with more people. You can use LinkedIn, email, or phone outreach to find the right prospects.

6. Being intelligent when targeting your clients

You must know whom to talk to and what they want. One-half of B2B leads may not meet an organisation’s criteria or preferences.

Managing who your potential clients are can also help you get more leads. The key is understanding potential clients’ pain points to better cater to them and eventually increase the conversion rate of sales teams. By undertaking market segmentation, you’ll be able to increase buyer personas creation and discover their respective pain points.

7. Measuring the returns

Building successful marketing campaigns is challenging without knowing attribution and ROI (result, return on investment). Email prospecting enjoys direct and clear attribution. When you sign up for an email list, the platform records that as a new contact. When someone clicks a link in your email, they’re considered a conversion. There are many ways to track and measure the success of an online marketing campaign. The best way is to create actionable metrics that are relevant and measurable to your business or brand’s goals.

8. Mastering the response time

One challenge of lead generation is to reply promptly. It can feel like a simple solution, and the stats show that it’s essential to handle leads quickly [1]:

1. There is a 100% success rate of targeting a lead within 5 minutes that drops significantly after 30 minutes.
2. Having a response to your enquiry is the most important thing for customers in the research stage. 78% of customers buy from companies that respond first.

One way to measure this is through your sales velocity: it can help you keep an eye on how quickly leads are coming in. You’ll have to dig in a little to uncover why your response time is slow. Still, your sales velocity can be used to identify priority areas.

Also read: MIA Research Report: Shifting Marketing Priorities

Pro tips to help avoid challenges associated with lead generation

In this post, we discussed some of the specific lead gen challenges and how to overcome them. But wouldn’t it be better to nip it right in the bud? Here are a few tips to follow with your lead-generating efforts. If you adhere to these guidelines, you will have greater success with lead gen and avoid some common pitfalls.

1. The foundation for any lead generation effort is to understand your audience. Starting with people who are not your target demographic will only lead to frustration.
2. Before you start marketing, get a better understanding of your potential customers by mapping out persona types. Learn the backgrounds, needs and interests of your audience so you can connect with them.
3. Creating marketing materials that solve problems for your target audience sounds challenging and reaching decision-makers is more complicated than it seems. But there are some strategies you can use to do this more effectively. Tailor your lead generation strategies to meet the needs of different levels of seniority. Use of outbound marketing can be a great way to find decision makers .
4. Fifty years ago, you could launch a marketing campaign without relying on analytics, but times have changed. Today it’s vital that campaigns track what they’re succeeding at and be able to identify new opportunities. The rise of data is what’s driving the commercial world today. It can be much fun running experiments and recording metrics to learn from successful and unsuccessful attempts.
5. No two businesses are alike, which is why it’s so important to make sure you have the right mix of channels for your business. One of the big decisions when figuring out your marketing strategy is deciding what should be handled in time and where it’s better to outsource.

Also recommended: MIA Research Report: Best Brand Building Practices- What Experience Teaches Businesses

Endnotes

1. https://sopro.io/added-value/blog/why-your-lead-response-times-could-be-killing-your-sales/