Written By Naren Kumar
Every business wants to grow and this requires lead generation. However, generating high-quality B2B leads isn’t easy. According to Semrush, 48% of B2B marketers believe it to be a challenging aspect of business growth. If done correctly, then it can boost your sales pipeline, help build good client relationships and increase revenue, but if it is done wrong, then it can lead to wastage of resources, frustrated employees and poor business growth.
Many companies make similar mistakes while trying to generate leads. These mistakes can be easily avoided by following the right approach. Let’s explore the top 10 most common mistakes companies make in B2B lead generation and ways through which you can avoid them.
1. Chasing the Wrong Leads
Companies often assume that getting more leads means getting more sales. Unfortunately, this approach isn’t applicable in the B2B landscape and can even backfire.
What goes wrong:
Companies try to collect as many leads as possible without checking if these leads fit their ideal customer profile. This results in their sales teams making efforts to connect with prospects that are not qualified and interested in buying their services/products.
How to avoid it:
To avoid this issue, companies should try to collect quality leads instead of focusing only on the number of leads. You should create a detailed ideal customer profile by including factors such as industry, budget, company size and business challenges.
By checking if companies fit your ideal customer profile, your sales team can narrow down the list and spend their energy on connecting with leads that are more likely to be converted. Following this approach can help you close more business deals.
2. Undefined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Having inadequate information about who your perfect customer is can cause your lead generation strategy to fail.
What goes wrong:
Not creating an ideal customer profile can cause your marketing and sales teams to target companies that do not require your services. It can result in the wastage of time and energy on writing customized emails that offer little ROI.
How to avoid it:
You should analyze your best customers and build your ideal customer profile based on this data. Analyze things like which industry they are from, what problems you solve for them, what size companies you serve best, etc. By looking at the historical sales data, your team can refine these profiles and make the lead generation process much sharper and effective.
3. Neglecting Data Hygiene
When it comes to B2B lead generation, data is everything. However, you must pay attention to ensure that the data is correct and related, as incorrect data can ruin even the most perfectly designed campaigns.
What goes wrong:
Factors like duplicate entries, outdated contact information, invalid email addresses and incorrect job titles can considerably lower the campaign’s performance. It can cause your sales team to waste time on contacting the wrong people or chasing leads that have already moved on.
How to avoid it:
You must prioritize data hygiene and use data validation tools for verifying email addresses and phone numbers. By scheduling audits periodically to remove duplicate entries and update outdated records, you can ensure you have reliable data at all times. This can enable you to do targeted outreach, better segmentation and increase response rates.
4. Overlooking Personalization
General outreach doesn’t make much of an impact anymore. People nowadays expect personalized experiences. This is true even for B2B buyers.
What goes wrong:
Instead of sending personalized emails, companies often send the same emails to all their leads, irrespective of the industry, role, or stage of the buying process they are in. This results in poor engagement and lowers conversion rates.
How to avoid it:
If you want to build meaningful connections, then you must focus on personalization. By using the data you have gathered, you can personalize your communication. Start with writing personalized subjects and opening lines in your emails.
Add specific pain points that are relevant to the prospect’s industry or role. This can make a big difference and show that you have done your research and don’t just want to make more sales, but also want to help their business.
5. Relying on a Single Channel
Depending only on one channel of communication can be risky, especially when it comes to lead generation.
What goes wrong:
Some companies depend only on a specific channel of communication, like cold email, LinkedIn outreach, or just paid advertising. However, if that channel underperforms, then it can have a huge impact on your lead pipeline, causing it to suffer. According to Exploding Topics, 97% of individuals ignore cold calls.
How to avoid it:
Instead of relying only on a single channel, you should adopt a multi-channel approach. By combining content marketing, social media webinars, paid ads, email marketing, SEO, etc., you can approach prospects through various channels. This diversified approach can increase your reach and reduce your dependence on a single channel.
6. Weak Lead Nurturing
Generating a lead is just the first step. The next step is to nurture it, as without proper nurturing, most leads do not convert.
What goes wrong:
Companies often collect leads, but don’t engage with them after the initial contract. Following up consistently is important as leads can otherwise grow cold and at times even disengage completely. According to Exploding Topics, 44% of sales representatives are too busy to follow up with leads.
How to avoid it:
You should focus on developing an advanced lead-nurturing strategy that delivers good results over time. By sending out blogs, industry reports, newsletters, customer success stories and educational webinars, you can effectively engage with leads.
Make use of marketing automation to send personalized messages on time, based on where the lead is in their buyer journey. The aim behind this is to build trust with the lead until it is ready to engage with sales.
7. Poor Alignment Between Sales and Marketing
Other than having a good lead generation strategy, it’s also vital to have good alignment between your sales and marketing teams. Only when they are aligned will you be able to see progress in lead generation.
What goes wrong:
Work pressure can cause the marketing team to complain that the sales team isn’t following up on deals, while the sales team may complain that the marketing team is giving low-quality leads. This poor alignment can result in missed opportunities and cause frustration among employees.
How to avoid it:
Try to encourage collaboration between sales and marketing teams. It’s important to establish what qualifies as a marketing qualified lead and what as a sales qualified lead. By creating shared goals, hosting regular meetings and creating an environment that supports open communication, you can improve teamwork and make your lead generation strategy more effective.
8. Skipping Lead Scoring
It isn’t necessary to give every lead the same amount of attention.
What goes wrong:
Lead scoring is a vital step, which, if skipped, can cause the sales team to waste time on chasing unqualified leads while ignoring quality leads that are closer to making a purchase.
How to avoid it:
Build a lead scoring system that scores leads based on how well they match the ideal customer profile and how much interest they show. For example, a lead that often visits your site, downloads whitepapers, opens newsletters and blogs should be given a higher score than someone who just opened one email. Doing this helps guide sales teams’ efforts towards qualified leads that have a higher chance of converting.
9. Generic Content Strategy
Content plays a huge role in B2B lead generation, so having a generic content strategy can slow down the lead generation process.
What goes wrong:
Companies sometimes produce content that is too promotional, lacks valuable information, or is irrelevant to their target audience’s needs. Publishing such content can lower your chances of engaging with prospects and attracting them.
How to avoid it:
Develop a comprehensive content strategy that is focused on solving your audience’s problems. Create content in different formats for every stage of the buyer journey. Publish educational blog posts, informative whitepapers, customer case studies and product comparison guides. By posting such high-value content, you can trust and position your business as an authoritative and reliable source.
10. Failing to Analyze and Optimize
Lead generation requires constant efforts. It isn’t a one-time task that you can do and forget.
What goes wrong:
Many companies launch campaigns but don’t track their results. Not gathering data can cause you to put resources into strategies and not understand what is working and what isn’t.
How to avoid it:
It’s important to track key performance indicators (KPIs) like cost per lead, conversion rates, lead-to-opportunity ratio and sales cycle length. You can make use of A/B testing to optimize email subject lines, ad copies, landing pages and more. By regularly analyzing campaign performance and adjusting strategies based on these insights, you can elevate your lead generation strategy.
Evaluate your current lead generation strategy and turn your mistakes into opportunities by making a few changes. In case you still feel that you need more help, contact a reliable lead generation company like DemandZEN. They offer comprehensive lead generation services to support businesses and shorten their sales cycle.
