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What Most Companies Get Wrong About B2B Lead Generation

B2B lead generation is indispensable if you want to consistently increase sales and maintain a steady flow of revenue. Unfortunately, there are aspects of lead generation that many B2B companies get objectively wrong. 

The end result is a lead generation strategy that generates low-quality leads, produces them inconsistently, and wastes time and money.

What are the biggest misconceptions and mistakes that lead to this result? And how can you avoid them?

Quantity Over Quality

Too many lead generation strategies are fundamentally based on the idea that more is better. If each lead is a potential sale, more leads mean you’ll automatically have more sales, right?

It’s not exactly wrong that more leads is a good thing, but the value of quantity pales in comparison to the value of quality. It’s easy to demonstrate this with a simple thought experiment. Would you rather have 1 lead that’s ready to convert or 100 leads that have little to no chance of converting?

The answer is obvious. Even a small number of high-quality leads will eventually provide you more value than a large number of low-quality leads.

This is where shopper marketing comes into play. For your generation strategy to be effective, you need to target the right people with the right messaging. You need to understand who your target customer is, what makes them ready to buy, and the factors responsible for making them pull the trigger. 

You shouldn’t waste your lead generation resources on generation strategies that are improperly targeted or focused only on generating large volumes of indifferent people.

A Monochannel Approach

Depending on who your target demographics are, there might be one channel that provides disproportionate value to your organization in terms of lead generation. For example, you might have had remarkable success generating leads on LinkedIn.

If you want to stay competitive in the modern era of lead generation, a monochannel approach can’t possibly work. There is no single channel where you can reach everyone, and different channels offer different strengths and weaknesses. 

If you want to expand your brand visibility, generate more leads, and generate better leads at the same time, you need to adopt an omnichannel approach. Use many different platforms and channels to get your message out there.

Misalignment Between Sales and Marketing

Sometimes, lead generation strategies flounder because of a fundamental misalignment between sales and marketing. Oftentimes, marketing teams are responsible for creating brand assets and strategies for producing leads, while salespeople are responsible for fielding those leads and turning them into customers. If leads are introduced to the brand with misleading messaging or poor targeting, salespeople will have their work cut out for them. It’s crucial to have a dialogue between these two different, yet tightly interrelated departments.

Poor Lead Management

Did you know that only 8 percent of sales reps follow up 6 or more times? Most people aren’t ready to buy right away, and they may not even respond to you right away. The only way to extract the full value out of every lead is to remain persistent.

If you poorly manage your leads by failing to follow up, dropping interested leads, poorly organizing your lead information, or committing other mistakes, the value of your lead generation strategy is going to plummet. It’s not enough to generate high quality leads; you also need to be prepared to treat those leads properly.

Empty, Valueless Interactions

In our last point, we explained the importance of following up with your leads multiple times. But many companies make a mistake even when they do follow up consistently; they bombard their leads with empty, valueless interactions.

If you want to persuade your leads to work with you, you need to provide them value first. They need to see that your brand is an authority on this subject and they need to feel like this is a potentially mutually beneficial partnership. 

Plus, offering value in the form of advice, content, or freebies encourages a feeling of reciprocity – so your leads are more likely to at least respond to your messages.

No Motivation to Improve

Lead generation strategies have practically infinite improvement potential – but that’s going to be wasted if you never spend time optimizing your approach. If you’re complacent with your current results, or if you aren’t willing to invest the time or resources into lead generation optimization, you’ll never achieve your full potential.

B2B lead generation is easy to start, but highly challenging to master. Without the proper tools, strategies, and approaches, you’ll continue to see mediocre results indefinitely. Fortunately, once you recognize the aforementioned problems and put a plan in place to fix them, you’ll have a much better chance of growing your sales.