Avoid These Common Mistakes to Generate More Qualified Leads
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from our customers is that they aren’t generating enough qualified leads for their business. Generating a strong volume of leads to fuel your sales pipeline funnel is a good thing, but only if they’re converting into qualified opportunities – and ultimately high-value customers.
What’s the Issue?
If you are making ample investments in your marketing program, have put the recommended tools, teams, systems, and best practices in place for at least six months, and you still are not generating the qualified leads that you need to grow your business, it’s time to reevaluate your efforts.
Top 5 Lead Generation Pitfalls & How to Overcome Them
#1: Sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned. Various industry statistics point to the ROI of sales and marketing alignment. According to MarketingProfs, sales and marketing alignment can lead to 38% higher sales win rates. However, while not intentional, not aligning sales and marketing is one of the most common mistakes that businesses make (we’ve been there).
Solution: Focus on sales enablement. Often businesses are so laser focused on their top-of-the-funnel marketing efforts that they don’t pay enough attention (if any at all) to their sales enablement strategy. In a nutshell, sales enablement is the iterative process of providing your business’ sales team with the vital resources that they need to close more deals. These tools include the content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers. Want to learn more about sales enablement best practices? Head here and there.
#2: Selecting your target accounts without clear criteria. If you were asked to narrow down your highest-value “must-win” prospects and “must-grow” clients to a short list of no more than 25 to 50 accounts, could you? Even if you have a general understanding of who your target customers are, getting them onto a short list challenges your team to really think about why they are worthy of making the cut.
Solution: Develop a clear set of criteria to identify your ideal buyer. Use specific criteria to help you determine why an account or prospect should be a high priority for sales and marketing. For instance, is there a revenue range that your target clients fall within? Are there particular industries where you are seeing the greatest demand for your products or services? Think about the most important reasons why your most valuable clients choose your product, service, or brand over your competitors, the specific challenges that your product or service solves for them, and what makes that relationship so successful. Let those answers guide you in defining the right ideal client profile criteria.
#3: Not understanding your target audiences’ unique needs. Without fully understanding the ins and outs of your prospects’ needs, pain points, and desires, how can you effectively speak to those needs?
Solution: Create buyer personas that describe who your ideal customers are, what their days are like, the challenges they face, and how they make decisions. Taking the time to create buyer personas not only helps you to properly define who your target buyer is, it ensures that your sales and marketing activities and content meet their needs. Check out more on buyer personas from our friends at HubSpot.
#4: Launching a marketing campaign without a lead nurture and follow-up plan. You have invested in developing a well-thought marketing strategy, building your marketing tech stack, and creating compelling content and campaigns. Now… you are ready to launch! Whoops, not quite yet if you don’t also have an effective plan for nurturing and following-up with leads once they start flowing in… Often, valuable leads end up idling in your sales team’s inbox or Salesforce.com/CRM lead queue before eventually losing interest because businesses fail to establish an effective and efficient process for lead nurture, qualification, and sales follow-up.
Solution: Leverage marketing automation and lead scoring. Marketing automation platforms take the manual labor out of nurturing and qualifying leads by automatically triggering outbound, personalized marketing and sales messages to leads and prospects after they enter the sales funnel or respond to a specific marketing campaign or message. In addition, marketing automation platforms offer lead scoring functionality that assigns a score and grade to every lead, based on defined rules that help determine the quality of that lead to the business, such as company size, the prospect’s level of engagement, or the action that they took – for example, clicking on a link, filling out a form, or unsubscribing from an email list. Marketing should assist on these tasks in an automated fashion wherever possible, and leaving closing to the sales team.
#5: Not having enough marketing analytics to draw conclusions. The only way to know why your leads aren’t converting is to have a reliable system to accurately measure the impact and results of your marketing campaigns. If you don’t know where your leads are coming from, which campaigns or channels are the most or least successful in terms of sales dollars generated, and why, then you won’t really be able to know what is preventing your leads from converting.
Solution: Unlock the power of marketing analytics. The good news is that marketers now have an abundance of platforms and tools at their fingertips to help you get meaningful insight into how campaigns are moving the sales needle. If you don’t have a Google Analytics account set up and connected to your website, that’s a good place to start understanding your web traffic trends and user behaviors. You can also leverage the free, out-of-the-box analytics tools offered by today’s quite specialized marketing automation platforms and CRMs to measure your campaign and lead conversion performance.
Need to generate more qualified leads? Get in touch with ResultRocket to rev up your revenue engine!
