Lead Generation Challenges

By Author: Rohan Leo
Total Articles: 13
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Clients, prospects, leads, feet… If you are in a business-to-business company you know you are constantly searching for those. Any business would do well with more of those right?

As it turns out, the biggest challenges are selecting the right tactic to generate quality leads, implementing lead generation activities consistently, breaking through the noise and getting the attention of busy decision makers, while measuring and tracking along the way.

Raintoday.com partnered up with ITSMA (2010), conducted some research and discovered the number one challenge companies face when trying to generate leads. 845 B2B services professionals were polled with 42.1% of them said that finding a strategy, tactic or offer that gets the attention of potential leads was most challenging.

More recently BtoB Magazine in 2013 did a survey with US B2B marketers and for 60% of them, generating more leads remained their top challenge. Which was followed by the challenge of getting your message to those people. Successfully. Brand awareness, accurate measurements, and customer retention followed.

Looking at that, it ...
... seems to me Lead generation is still the number one challenge for businesses. In fact, it seems things are not getting easier at all. Which is actually quite surprising for me. I have spent more time that I would like to admit chasing the dream in side of safelists, traffic exchanges, mail exchanges etc etc etc. I am not saying they are not useful and don’t serve a purpose. I don’t think the reward and success balances out with the time spent in them… My personal observation and opinion from my own experiences… Of course if you have it automated that changes things… Anyways… I am getting side tracked… Will talk more about safelists etc at a later stage.

My point and what I did learn from safelists etc is that it’s a great place to keep an eye on the market and the competition… You get to see what people are doing and what is popular… I was amazed at how many different opportunities for success there was, some true, others not so much. What I did realise fast in my online marketing career was just about everyone speaks about leads and offers programs that get your leads… On Autopilot, push button sit back and relax… If there are so many opportunities to get leads and everyone’s system is the best and works great at getting leads… How come 60% of B2B marketers said their biggest challenge was lead generation?

Sure there are several factors involved as to why a company would have that challenge. For one, B2B companies who are not doing a good job at measuring and keeping stats of how they find and build relationships with their leads are going to find it harder to overcome the lead generation challenge. Another big struggle was using social media in lead generation strategies, and it seems content marketing came second with the challenge of getting quality content out there.

A very interesting stat that came out of the survey, and one that really gets me excited is the fact that 58% of those B2Bs primary objective was to improve the quality of leads. It is fantastic to see B2B are less interested in spreading themselves thin all over the internet and are much more interested in building relationship with targeted prospects. This makes me happy because these are great stats for my business. Which happens to be targeted lead generation on autopilot. (Just incase you brand new, autopilot doesnt mean I sit and do nothing all day long.. No, no. It just means I have systems in place that do the busy work for me)

I also can’t help but think about Google+ and it’s “Circle” feature… HMMMM