3 Lead Generation Challenges Every B2B Business Faces

3 Common Lead Generation Challenges for B2B Businesses

As a business owner or marketer, you already know the frustration of attracting and converting website visitors into leads. You pour your time and money into blogging, PPC ads, guest posts, and social media marketing, but your pipeline is still not getting enough leads.

That is a big problem. Remember, lead generation is the lifeblood of any business. Without leads, your sales pipeline runs dry, and revenue growth stalls. No wonder 91% of B2B marketers view lead generation as their most important marketing goal. Unfortunately, the road to successful lead generation has several challenges.

In this article, we'll explore the top three lead generation challenges B2B organizations face and how to overcome them:

1. Lack of a Lead Generation Strategy That Converts

Lead generation isn’t about waiting for prospects to visit your website or fill out your opt-in forms. In fact, 80% of new leads never even convert into sales. Hence, businesses need a well-documented strategy to attract, engage, and nurture their leads until they make a purchase. 

A successful lead generation strategy starts with creating a comprehensive plan that aligns with the overall business goals. Identify ideal customers, their preferred channels, as well as their needs and pain points. Based on what you find, as part of your strategy, you’ll need to create a multi-channel content plan tailored to each stage of the customer journey. This will help ensure you get potential clients to your site. 

Develop middle-of-funnel content like social media posts, guides, and blog posts that address common pain points and low-funnel content like case studies and demo videos that showcase your product's value. Create lead-generation assets like dedicated landing pages that resonate with your potential customers. Use them alongside opt-in and pop-up forms to convert website visitors into leads, as shown below.

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Don’t forget to set up the necessary tools and automated processes to ultimately ensure sales. This includes leveraging CRM software to manage customer relationships and employing social media management tools for effective engagement. As part of your strategy, you also want to leverage effective email marketing services to nurture leads into buying customers. 

A good email marketing platform can help you automatically send personalized emails to prospects who have shown interest but have yet to buy. The first email could be a welcome email that also provides helpful information related to their needs. The second email could give a coupon or promo code. The third could invite them to a free consultation or demo. 

Also, put in place a reporting and data analytics system that can help optimize the lead generation process over time. With a documented lead generation strategy, teams will know their respective roles in lead generation. Businesses can ensure these various teams work together efficiently and successfully toward the same goal.

2. Generating Quality Leads

We talked about how important it is to have a plan that attracts, engages, and nurtures leads until they buy. Let’s zero in on that first part: attracting leads. The truth is, it’s not enough for you to just attract ordinary leads. If you want to increase the chances of a sale, you have to ensure you attract quality leads from the get-go. One of the most common lead generation challenges is generating these quality leads. 

Misalignment between the marketing and sales teams can lead to low-quality leads. For instance, the customer profile the marketing teams use for their campaigns may differ from the one the sales reps use. Hence, marketing passes low-quality leads to the sales team. This leads to a lower conversion rate. Or, if the leads convert, they churn after a while.

So, to ensure you produce high-quality leads, ensure the sales and marketing teams align on these customer profiles. Make sure they also use consistent marketing messaging across all channels and track joint KPIs.   

The same customer profile must also be shared by other external partners you may be working with, like PR and marketing agencies. Essentially, you want everyone on the same page to ensure you’re attracting leads that can actually benefit from your product long-term.

On the other hand, you can improve your lead qualification processes by collecting more data from your leads. Data is king when it comes to lead generation, and only 65% of marketers report having high-quality data about their target audience. 

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Ask website visitors to submit data like their job posting, the company budget, and their pain points to download a lead magnet. When you compare their profile against your ideal customer profile, you can then determine which leads are likely to buy. Use the checklist above to qualify your leads. If you answered “yes” to all these questions about a lead, prioritize that lead.

3. Measuring ROI and Performance

For B2B businesses with longer sales cycles, it could take weeks or months to close a deal from an initial lead. This lag time makes it hard to tie lead generation efforts to business outcomes. Also, since modern B2B businesses have adopted multi-channel marketing efforts, attributing results to specific campaigns can become challenging. This becomes an even bigger problem when you have data spread across different silos.

To overcome this challenge, companies need to invest in modern martech solutions like HubSpot, Twilio, Salesforce, and Uberflip that integrate CRM, email, social media, and website data to provide a seamless data flow. Such a connected lead management system gives you the full context of a lead’s journey, rather than disjointed data silos.

Next, focus on meaningful KPIs that are aligned with your lead generation goals, such as attribution, demos booked, number of MQLs & SQLs generated, cost per lead, and sales velocity. A good lead management system will help with tracking these KPIs.

Conclusion

Lead generation is crucial for business growth, but it comes with its biggest challenges. This article highlighted three lead generation challenges B2B companies face when acquiring new leads.

These include a lack of effective strategies for lead generation, an inability to generate qualified leads, and difficulty measuring marketing ROI and lead generation performance. Solutions to these challenges require an integrated strategy and alignment across marketing and sales teams. 

By focusing on lead quality, conversion optimization, a documented lead-generation strategy, targeted messaging, and performance measurement, companies like yours can maximize the ROI of lead-generation campaigns. 

Go ahead and do just that.