If you are in a B2B business, perhaps you are fully aware that lead generation goes beyond contacting leads through email or phone call. Your main goal is to continuously fill the pipeline with quality leads and eventually convert these leads to sales and revenue.
Generating leads for a business is easier said than done. Lead generation is comprised of several processes in order to reach the target audience. If you have been in a business and you think that your lead generation campaign does not provide you with results as you are expecting it to do, it is about time to re-evaluate your processes and see if you have one of these roadblocks.
Lack Of Lead Management
Lead management is an integral part of growing the sales pipeline. It is a process of centralizing and maximizing customer’s data management and sales and marketing communication. With proper lead management, lead generation will be a lot more efficient and getting high-quality leads quickly will be more feasible than before.
Without lead management, streamlining the processes, tracking progress and most importantly, getting a large number of quality leads will be difficult. Overall, lead management can boost business productivity. Here are some benefits of utilizing an effective lead management.
Right Customer Targeting
In lead generation, the first thing you have to do before you start gathering leads is to determine the right people to target in the campaign. Targeting the right people will give you better results is less time.
Research is very important in determining your target. You have to know how to reach out through them. Find out their interests, their common problems, their buying behaviors and their most preferred means of communication.
Align Tasks Towards One Goal
Understand that every business is comprised of different tasks. These tasks, though different are interconnected with each other. These tasks have the same end game. With lead management, it is easy to align tasks to achieve the same ultimate goal. Processes will be streamlined and it will be easier to track progress with one reporting.
More Time To Nurture Relationship
Lead generation does not stop by reaching out to your target audience. You have to nurture your relationship with the leads to take them to the next step. However, with so many things to do, nurturing relationship with leads tends to be overlooked.
Lead management also involves marketing automation software which we call CRM or Customer Relation Software Management. This will allow lead generation automation which maximize process and eventually, giving you more time to nurture the relationship with leads and converting them as customers.
The Conflict Between Sales And Marketing Team
It is not uncommon to see sales and marketing team conflicts in a business. In a survey, 87% from both teams have negative descriptions to one another.
These teams are considered as two of the most integral part for lead generation. The sales and marketing team plays an important role for growing your sales pipeline. However, these teams tend to be competing with each other on which is more integral part of a business which is obviously bad for business. Though each team when working independently can provide an improvement to lead generation, it cannot provide a substantial amount of leads which the teams can deliver when working together.
So how can you make these teams work together? It is not as complicated as what you may think. According to this blog post, there are 3 effective ways to make these two teams work together. Creating an omnichannel approach, better communication and setting the same goal are few of the simple but effective way to make sales and marketing team work together.
Lack Of Diversity In Lead Generation Campaign
There is no silver bullet in lead generation. These days, if a business is utilizing only one lead generation strategy, the business is bound to fail. With so many improvements in technology, consumers’ buying behavior also has changed. Adapting to modern sales and marketing strategies are very important to keep your leads coming. Aside from the traditional trade shows and offline marketing techniques, there are tons of online marketing strategies you can choose from. Here are some.
- Attract leads through content marketing.
- Build network through social media.
- Reach out to mobile consumers.
Communicating To Leads With Incorrect Data
Communication is vital to nurture leads and convert them to sales. This is critical to keep the pipeline flowing. Yes, it requires lots of effort but that’s what it takes to achieve a successful lead generation campaign.
There are lots of ways to communicate with your leads. Aside from face-to-face interaction, phone calls and text messaging, social media, email marketing, chats are among the most common ways to communicate with leads.
However, communicating with leads is not as simple as it may seem. Before you start building connection, you need to verify that all information about your product, service or business are correct as well as the information you gathered about your leads.
As a business, when you are communicating with your leads, you have to persuade them to do action. You need to take them to the next level of converting them into sales. So make sure your information are correct and make your interaction simple, easy to understand and entertaining.
No Unified Goals For The Business
Perhaps, one of the best solutions to have a successful lead generation campaign is to have a unified goal for your business. It’s time to break down the SILO mentality and get all your teams working together towards your business goals. In lead generation, you have the same goal… to generate high-quality leads quickly. SILO mentality can cripple the lead generation campaign since each team works on their own without getting the support from other teams. Thus, it is difficult to leverage on different strategies which can help boost the lead generation campaign.
Setting up unified goals will lead all the teams together in one path. Think of your business as a highway intersection and your teams are coming from different directions. Your goal is to lead them north. No matter where they are coming from, whether it is from east, west or south, you need to sync their tasks which will lead them to go north. That’s how important having a unified goal is.
Wrapping Up
Ideally, as marketers, business owners or entrepreneurs, you want to see leads going down the pipeline but let’s face it; it is not an easy task. Do get too fixated on what is already working because things are changing and customers’ behavior shifts. Continuous research and innovative thinking are still an integral tool that will help you generate leads increasingly.
Images “Creative sign with the text – Lead Generation, Next Exit / Shutterstock.com“
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