5 Major Lead Generation Challenges And The Recommended Solutions
For many businesses in various industries, numerous ways to attract customers are increasing in many newfound methods. However, this also means that businesses will also face many new lead generation challenges.
In this article, we’re going to tell you what those challenges are and the recommended solutions to overcome them. But before we delve further into those lead generation challenges, let’s talk first about what is lead generation.
What Is Lead Generation?
One of the main objectives of any business is to acquire leads. A lead is any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service. Every potential customer can be called a “lead”.
And the process of acquiring potential customers by invoking their interest in the products or services of a company is called lead generation. The goal of lead generation is to convert visitors into customers by increasing their interest through nurturing strategies. Selling products or services efficiently is not the only way to gather promising leads.
There are many ways to generate leads, some of which include job applications, blog posts, online content, and events, among many others.
It is the process of lead generation that shall turn a potential lead into an existing, or even returning customer for any brand, which in turn leads to a sales increase. This process also lets you know exactly who your customers are.
Lead Generation’s Survey Takeaways
Within the challenges of lead generation itself, there are various factors which business stakeholders deem vital and most challenging. Now we are going to look at the top-three survey results that are dedicated to lead generation for the last five years.
According to The State of B2B Lead Generation survey by Digital Doughnut in 2017, factors that are needed to succeed include:
- Lead quality: 30%
- Getting the right processes in place: 28%
- Tracking ROI from leads: 26%
According to the Generating and Nurturing Leads Report by Ascend2 in 2018, the top priorities for a lead generation strategy to achieve include:
- Improve the quality of leads: 58%
- Increase the number of leads: 46%
- Improve strategy effectiveness: 37%
According to the B2B Perspectives on Lead Generation Quality survey by Ascend2 in 2019, the primary strategies for generating higher quality leads include:
- Improving content and content engagement: 62%
- Improving the personalization of marketing efforts: 55%
- Improving data management tools/platform: 31%
According to the State of Content Marketing Global Report by Semrush in 2020, the top content marketing challenges include:
- Creating content that generates quality leads: 51%
- Creating content that attracts more traffic: 47%
- Proving the ROI of our content: 44%
And lastly, according to the State of B2B Digital Marketing survey by WPromote in 2021, major barriers to B2B marketing success include:
- Aligning marketing and sales: 37%
- Generating enough leads: 36%
- Securing staff & budget: 36%
Based on these surveys, you can see that lead generation is a major challenge for business leaders nowadays. To see it more clearly rather than delving into pure numbers and percentages, let’s discuss the challenges further.
Lead Generation Challenges and Their Solutions
After looking back five years and more intensive research, we have gathered five of the most recent lead generation challenges that your company shall face, along with the recommended solutions.
1. Finding & Forming The Right Strategy
A bad lead generation strategy might cause serious negative consequences for the entire business. Instead, it might attract a batch of bad quality leads. This will cost your company more time, effort, resources, and money.
That’s why the initial pathway to lead generation is important, and that is to build a solid lead generation strategy and campaign.
Another challenge is that many business leaders tend to follow the trend instead of building their own lead generation strategies.
For example, many people often recommend using referral marketing strategy to generate sales. This might not be enough. A referral marketing strategy might not guarantee an authentic lead.
Solution:
You need a lead generation campaign strategy that you build on your own, coupled with providing relevant and valuable content, and solid implementation. Make sure your internal team agree on the strategy. Monitor performance and channel analytics. Also, don’t be afraid to experiment with new lead generation techniques and analyze what exactly works the best for your business.
Don’t forget to find out relevant information regarding your customers. What’s important to them, how they make decisions, issues they’re facing, etc. The better you know about your audience, the better you’ll be able to develop campaign strategies that will get their attention.
2. Managing The Funding
One of the challenges in lead generation is that it demands large budgets. Not to mention that you also need to pay for bills, electricity, internet, and office supplies. More spending on paid ads, landing pages, and email campaigns might also add to the costs.
Relying only on the in-house team could make it more challenging to fit all of these tasks into the budget.
Calculating how much money you should be spending on a lead generation strategy is no easy task. Even when you spend an outrageous amount of funds on your campaign, it still will not be able to guarantee success.
Solution:
The best solution regarding minimising budgets is to solve this problem at the very beginning of your sales pipeline. Poor planning will lead to inexcusable spending of money.
Try to measure your progress at each stage of the sales pipeline. It’s better if you have a closed-loop system in place to track all lead generation, lead nurturing, and sales activities. In turn, you’ll find that choosing funding tactics shall become much easier.
Though in some cases, outsourcing your business processes might be an option in cutting the costs of your lead generation.
3. Pursuing High Quality (and Quantity) Leads
Some say “quality over quantity”, but why not aim for both? By prioritising quality leads with a certain strategy, you might end up with a larger amount of leads than you might expect.
The problem is while implementing your lead generation campaign, some leads may choose to abandon your persuasion efforts, some might stick around, and some leads may not even realise they’re being targeted.
If you don’t do this part with the correct strategy, you might end up pursuing tons of poor-quality leads, which would be a waste of time, effort and money.
Solution:
The key to pursuing quality leads is to personalize your lead generation strategy. Try to engage customers on an individual level. Pay attention to your ideal customer and make efforts to pursue potential customers who fit that profile. Create a customer-driven marketing strategy that serves your lead generation campaign purposes.
First, you need to do some research and determine a detailed outline of your ideal customer profile. Avoid using generic and wide marketing cliches. Instead, try to build contents that would specifically appeal to your target. Try being specific enough so that your potential lead shall understand how your products or services meet their needs.
One way to do this is to talk to your top customers. Try to understand who your client base really is, what challenges they face, and how your products/services can help.
4. Nurturing, Converting, and Measuring Leads
Most companies tend to think that the goal is achieved once you acquire new leads. Don’t forget that the next steps are just as important; nurturing, converting, and measuring those leads.
Gaining new quality leads is not the endgame. People may come and go as they like. Gaining customers’ loyalty is one of the major lead generation challenges. Quality leads need to be turned and nurtured into productive prospects.
Competitions are vast, and with so many options on the market, your clients are looking for businesses that would give the time and effort to build personal relationships and foster trust with their clients.
Solution:
Nurturing your customers means taking care of them, and making them feel safe and secure. You need to keep engaging your customers consistently so that they will come to you again when looking for solutions in the future. Make them feel heard and appreciated by engaging them on a regular basis.
And when you have loyal customers, you can convert them into sales solutions by educating your customers and building trust. Offer clients consistent and helpful information about your company and always reach out to them. Show your leads that you’re genuinely interested in helping them.
After you’re successful in gaining sales solutions, don’t forget to measure and document your successful leads. Make measurement a top priority. Find out where each lead comes from, how many qualified leads you’re generating, etc. This way, your future lead generation efforts will be easier and based on true data.
5. Having The Appropriate Workforce
Our last item of the challenges in lead generation is the people, or the company workforce. You need to make sure that your company has enough people to do the work.
Generating quality leads is no easy feat. Companies often find themselves in a pickle when the employees in charge are doing it all; lead generations, closing deals, and even maintaining clients. When one task is prioritised over another, lead generations would come to a halt.
Many companies suffer this problem and end up only doing lead generation once in a while—when the time and resources are available.
Most of the time salespeople can’t meet quotas because the leaders often hope prior sales experience among their reps will fill any knowledge gaps. This results in ineffective and inefficient workflow and might also lead to employees’ burnout.
Solution:
First of all, you need to make sure you have enough people. Secondly, you need people with appropriate skills and knowledge. This can be done by hiring, training, and equipping the right salespeople.
If it is financially feasible, try to have a dedicated workforce to lead generation. If not, try redistributing tasks or hire outsourced sales reps.
The essence is to have the right people in the right roles in order to have a sustainable engine that continually generates new leads.
Overcome Your Lead Generation Challenges With The Right Solution!
Finding and forming the right lead generation strategy will make it easier for your company to generate quality leads. Focusing on quality leads can potentially increase the rate of new customer acquisition.
Getting new customers at a high rate will allow you to quickly grow a loyal customer base, by consistently engaging and nurturing them. And all this would be easier when you have the appropriate workforce.
However, the best way to overcome these lead generation challenges is to have a great lead management system.
Flavor lead management system is equipped to manage and convert leads to clients/users in a shorter sales cycle. With our service, you can have automated inbound leads, where you can track and follow up on each one and convert them to users.
