B2B lead generation is a critical factor in the success of your business. If you have a steady flow of high quality sales leads this can help your company achieve its growth goals.
I’ve been working with companies to help them generate more and better quality leads for the last 20 years. Below are the 5 most common mistakes that I have seen. If you can overcome these then you should be well on your way to meeting your B2B lead generation targets.
1 – Don’t understand the market/audience
This is probably the biggest mistake that I see; at this point I’m not talking about your database but your understanding of the market place. I talk to many companies about their market; I often hear “we offer IT support so we can sell to any company up to £10 million turnover.” At this point they expect us to go and target all these companies to generate high quality sales leads.
Everybody thinks that their business is unique and nobody likes to feel that they are being sold a generic message by a company that doesn’t understand how they work or their unique attributes. This starts from the marketing communication you produce.
The more you know about your target market the more you will be able to segment it and offer products/services/marketing messages that engage your audience.
2 – Poor data
This is the next stage really to knowing your market. We often meet us the clients who have a good understanding of their market, know which individuals they want to target in companies in specific industries and size.
They then give us their database which they have built up over the last 10 years from an unknown number of sources. This data is missing industry information, size, job titles, email addresses, names, etc. etc.
If you’re doing direct marketing as part of your lead generation plan, as the name suggests you are marketing directly to the people who will be making decisions about your products and markets. If you target IT Directors in large discreet manufacturing companies or communicate to HR managers in small companies that you don’t know which industry of, you’re going to waste a huge amount of time, effort and money.
Likewise once you have the data keep it up to date. So often when we are doing telemarketing for clients we find out the contact left 5 years ago. Somebody in your business will already have known this but they haven’t updated the systems. Every bounced email, returned direct mail or telephone call should be updated in your CRM system immediately.
3 – Don’t believe the snake charmers
The marketing industry is completely unregulated which means anybody can set up as a marketing consultant and offer advice. This is something I see a lot of, often by new technology marketers. They always tell you that a certain type of lead generation/marketing is dead and that whatever they are selling is all you need to do.
I’ve been in the B2B lead generation industry long enough to remember a time before email, when email started they told us this was the death of direct mail, online was the death of email, social media was the death of everything and they have been telling me that telemarketing has died for the last 20 years.
To me lead successful lead generation is about using a combination of all marketing mediums. The problem is knowing which ones. This comes down to your budget and the first point about understanding your market.
As a company we only offer certain lead generation services, but our best clients are those that use different marketing partners or in-house teams doing lots of relevant activity that we can all utilise. This way we can all integrate with each and achieve better results.
4 – Sporadic B2B lead generation campaigns
We’ve all been there, either you or your Sales Director/Managing Director look at the medium/long term sales forecast and there are no new sales that will be closing, you then do a major lead generation campaign that generates some immediate opportunities. You then become too busy to follow up your pipeline and the process starts all over again.
B2B lead generation should be planned and form part of your marketing and sales plan which in turn should be a part of the whole business plan and strategy.
If you dedicate time, resources and money to consistent, constant lead generation you should never have the feast and famine that blights so many sales teams.
5 – Don’t follow up
One of the most frustrating things to me as a buyer is when companies don’t follow up. This could be at any stage of the sales pipeline from a web enquiry through to not receiving a proposal after a visit.
There is a lot of effort that goes into engaging prospects, this could be through any medium, and often at this point the hardest part is done. You need to understand their requirements, current pains, information requirements and timescales. You then need to use this information in your marketing communication to ensure that if they are not yet sales ready you continue communicating with them until they are.
