Have you been facing lead generation issues of late?
You’re not alone. Even the best have to face them.
Lead generation is a challenging process. After all, you need to win the trust of your audience and then get them to provide their contact information to you, and after the data census process, this information becomes leads.
So, here we talk about the top 5 lead generation issues businesses face. We’ll also discuss the solutions.
5 Lead Generation Issues and Their Solutions
Here are the top lead generation issues and possible solutions.
1. Not Having Enough Leads to Sell To
Don’t worry, you’re not the only one.
The most common lead generation issue among small businesses is not having a consistent lead stream that they can count on.
In fact, 54% of marketers have “increasing sales leads” as their top primary objective followed by “increasing customer acquisition” at 49%.
Image via Ascend2
Maybe you too face an erratic flow of leads or have almost no leads at all.
The first step should be to re-strategize your channels of marketing.
And if you haven’t focused on digital channels of marketing like Google Ads, social media marketing, SEO, and affiliate marketing yet, now is the time to do it.
2. Limited Resources
Isn’t this a ubiquitous issue for every business activity?
Whether it’s money, time, knowledge, or employees, limited resources are one of the biggest lead generation issues of our time for small businesses.
Small businesses often lack the budget to hire dedicated, tech-savvy, sales and marketing resources that are devoted to lead generation.
And this is one of the key lead generation issues that results in the failure of a marketing strategy.
If you don’t have time to spend hours responding to every email, sourcing leads through your website and identifying qualified leads via bounce backs, you need to invest in the best lead generation tool.
The right lead generation software like LinkedIn email finder can streamline things for you and reduce the number of issues you face. It automates functions that generally would eat up most of your time.
What’s more?
It can also detect and remove email bounces. This improves message deliverability and helps you focus your efforts on the best prospects.
3. Missing Personal Touch
Let’s agree on this – we all want tons of leads.
And to maximize the leads, many small businesses try too hard to maximize their reach in minimum time.
This often results in missing the personal touch. Their emails look canned and almost robotic.
The result?
Poor lead generation rates.
When you use your email newsletter software to send a generic message to your prospects, they know that thousands of other people have received the same email.
And this is where you lose the connection before it could even begin.
Modern lead generation strategies require you to have a personal touch in your messaging. You need to write creative email headlines to improve open rates.
This makes your prospects feel valued and connected, increasing your chances of getting a response.
To get this rolling, you need to segment your qualified leads into several groups and create a strategy around that. And this brings us to the next lead generation issue.
4: Not Achieving the Desired Conversion
This has happened with most of us.
Small businesses often waste their sales efforts by assigning their best sales resources with aggregated lead data.
Instead, they should sort their lead pool to prioritize the high-quality leads in order to improve lead conversion.
Does this sound very simple?
Well, it’s not that straightforward, unless you have a structured lead generation system in place.
Marketers use the concept of lead generation funnel to visualize the entire process.
Lead generation funnel allows businesses to segment prospects, nurture them properly, and transfer them to the sales team once they’re ready to buy.
It does sound cool, right?
Image via Medium
Typically, the lead generation funnel consists of these four stages:
- Awareness Stage: The stage where the prospects’ commitment toward your brand is low. Here, you make them aware of your brand, purpose, and value proposition.
- Consideration Stage: The prospects’ commitment is medium. You need to understand the buyer’s needs and optimize your marketing communication to capture their contact details.
- Conversion Stage: The prospects’ commitment is high, and you have to sell the “why.” Tap into their pain points and enlighten them about how your products or services can alleviate that.
- Retention Stage: Once they are your customers, it’s necessary to encourage them to drive referrals and turn them into brand advocates.
And before your head starts screeching, TOFU stands for Top of the Funnel, MOFU for Middle of the Funnel, and BOFU for Bottom of the Funnel.
5. Reducing Lead Generation Cost
As Peter Drucker once said, and I quote, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
After getting a regular stream of leads, obviously, you would want to reduce your cost per acquisition.
And in order to reduce the cost, you need to focus on your ideal customer group along with improving marketing key performing indicators (KPIs).
These are things like average time spent on a webpage, email open rate, conversion rate, etc.
For instance, to improve the average time spent on a webpage, you need to optimize your landing pages as per the search intent of visitors.
Improving average time spent will increase engagement and lead generation rate.
Wrapping Up
Marketing is all about identifying issues and finding their solutions.
- Do you have an insufficient number of leads? Re-strategize your channels of marketing and give digital channels of marketing a try.
- Are your resources limited? Automate processes using a lead generation software
- Do your emails miss a personal touch? Segment your qualified leads into several groups. Send personalized emails based on the behavior, interests, and demographics of each group
- Are your conversion rates low? Nurture your leads based on their stage on the lead generation funnel
- Are your lead generation costs high? Improve your key performance indicators
If you have come across any other lead generation issues in the recent past, please share with us in the comment box.
