4 reasons your lead generation strategy isn’t working
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Nothing gets salespeople more excited than high-quality leads.
Well, except for closing a new deal. Or their local McDonald’s reopening. But you get my point.
A high-performing lead generation strategy is the best food source for your sales pipeline. And a fuller pipeline means more sales and, ultimately, higher revenue. It’s that simple.
Whether your lead gen strategy is churning out poor leads or no leads at all, it’s probably down to one or more of these four reasons:
1. Inaccurate targeting
Think of your target audience as the foundation of your lead generation strategy – if it’s not right, everything falls apart.
Terabytes of email addresses and other contact information won’t do you any good if they’re not the right personas. Handing out free trials to everyone isn’t going to help matters, either. Essentially, you need to know which people/companies are most likely to buy from you – this is where customer behaviour insights are super useful.
Sales prospecting is an entire strategy in itself. Of course, the current working from home (WFH) situation has only made things harder. That’s why we’re helping businesses fix the most common WFH prospecting mistakes.
2. No inbound marketing strategy
In today’s world, a lead generation strategy without quality content is a lot like the movie adaptation of Cats; i.e. not good… not good at all.
With relevant content and the right strategy, you can nurture your prospects throughout the sales journey until they’re ready to buy. So, remember to use inbound marketing tools like lead magnets (downloadable content). Also, include calls-to-action (CTAs) and lead capture forms in blog posts to turn your website visitors into MQLs (marketing-qualified leads).
You also need to think about how your content is distributed. There’s no point spending loads of time on content creation if it doesn’t get seen by anyone. SEO tactics and LinkedIn lead generation campaigns are especially effective on this front.
According to Hubspot, 70% of companies are currently investing in content marketing. In other words, content marketing is essential to avoid falling behind your competitors.
3. Not addressing your customers’ pains
As I’ve explained, there needs to be a strategy around your blog posts, email marketing and other content. More specifically, all content should address relevant customer pains, i.e. those which can be solved by your product or service.
Why is this so important?
In the Raconteur Sales Performance 2020 report, durhamlane Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Richard Lane explained:
“It shouldn’t have to take a global pandemic to make salespeople put their feet in the shoes of the customer but, in some cases, it has. Being able to demonstrate that you can solve their pain and make their business perform better should be the guiding principle from which everything else flows.”
4. No alignment of sales & marketing
When it comes to a solid lead generation strategy, “strategy” is the operative word.
Methods such as Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and Demand Generation are used to properly align your sales and marketing activities (as opposed to outbound carpet-bombing while your marketing team write depressing blogs about “dealing with lockdown”).
You target relevant prospects, create content providing the info they need, then engage your target market with combined sales and marketing tactics.
This leads to demand creation, lead conversion and, ultimately, closing more sales.
With so many channels to cover (social media, email, search engines etc.), putting an effective lead generation strategy in place means investing both time and money.