Does the following scenario sound familiar to you? You spent a lot of time getting your marketing and sales efforts in sync and on the same page. The goal is to generate more B2B leads for your business, but sales remain stagnant.

Try this one:

You are a marketing or sales executive and end up frustrated because regardless of what number leads you generate, few or none of them are converting.

If so, you are not alone.

Organizations meeting the needs of other businesses are grappling with the issue of producing lead and sales ratios everywhere. The problem is that their strategy appears to operate on the surface-they have plenty of leads.

But the underlying problem is that these leads don’t generate sales. In B2B marketing, the quantity of leads often gets higher priority over the quality of the leads.

In this article, we will go over some of the most common reasons why B2B companies fail to generate quality leads.

7 Missteps that Kill B2B Lead Generation
The following list will go over some of the most common mistakes made when acquiring leads for your B2B business:

Targeting the Wrong Demographics

It can’t be stressed enough how important it is that you align your marketing efforts with the correct target demographic. Take into consideration the types of professionals most likely to use your product or service and align your marketing strategies to attract the attention of that particular group.

Create targeted buyer personas

A buyer persona is a hypothetical profile of a person who is likely to use your goods or services. You create this persona by considering the wants, needs, interest, and pain points of your target audience. Also known as demographic and psychographic information.

Consider:

Any available user data about your customers as well as real-world interactions that you have had to build an accurate and up-to – date buyer persona with them. A specific buyer persona can notify an effective marketing strategy.

Here are some free tools to get user-data:

Buyer personas are used to generate content relevant to your target market. So when your buyer persona is all wrong or not specific enough, your marketing efforts are going to waste.

• Quantcast – gives detailed user-data from your site.
• SimilarWeb – shows competitors user-data
• Tower Data – gives detailed user-data from an email list

You want to maximize quality leads which means you don’t want to get too specific with this profile. At the same time, you shouldn’t leave it too ambiguous, or you run the risk of targeting too broad an audience with minimal ROI.

What you can do:

• Create buyer personas (if you don’t have one then download our template here)
• Have your sales team fill out a form after they speak to an ideal prospect or client. They should notate the prospect’s title, function or role, common objections, and real quotes about their goals and challenges.

Failing to Warm Up and Nurture Leads

Cold calling and cold emailing aren’t useful anymore as stand-alone strategies. The mixture of outbound and digital strategy like social media are great ways to identify leads, interact with them, and warm them up. Once you have warm leads, then you can send them through your sales funnel once primed. This strategy is referred to as account-based marketing.

Far too often, companies are failing to nurture leads once they are warmed up. Lead nurturing includes following up with potential customers and offering them content that relates to the problems they face.

Try drip email campaigns to keep them abreast of your products/services or providing them with content that leads to more content relevant to their expressed interests.

what you can do

1. Create a lifecycle for your contacts. For example, categorize your contacts as prospects, leads (sale qualified and marketing qualified), and customers.
2. Tag your contacts by their buyer persona
3. Create content that solves very specific problems the personas face.
4. Write an email series of 3-5 emails for prospects to become leads, leads to become customers, and customers to repeat purchase or send referrals. Here’s an example; Let’s say your sales team has a prospect that is the Purchasing Manager for a large retail chain. Knowing that their biggest challenge is finding reliable vendors or suppliers to provide quality goods at reasonable prices, you’re marketing team prepared a market analysis of market prices and order fulfillment data to send to prospects. You can craft an email series highlighting the data and what it means to them and their job. The point is, create content that speaks directly to your prospect’s challenges and nurtures them by letting them know you understand their challenges.

Weak Communication

The line of communication between the sales and marketing departments of your business should be humming like a hard drive. There should be a near-constant feed of information passed between these two departments. They should be communicating which campaigns lead to sales, how leads get followed up with, which leads converted, and so on.

Lack of Automation

Today there are tons of helpful tools that take mundane tasks out of the hands of your staff so that they can focus on more important things.

Lead generation fails when the brains of the operation are stuck scheduling social media posts, composing follow-up emails, and the like.

Many of these tasks, such as email campaigns can be fully automated to boost overall productivity. They can help save time and effort by filtering out those reached out to who didn’t respond and identifying prime leads interested in your product or service. Then all your staff has to do is reach out to these leads accordingly.

What you can do:

• Hubspot
• Marketo
• SharpSpring
• Klaviyo (E-commerce).

Prioritizing Weak Leads

In the first place, if your leads don’t convert your team may give priority to weak leads. Strengthy lead prioritization can go hand in hand with automation. You may launch an automated email campaign by implementing a lead scoring system, which will recognize strong leads. Reprioritizing your leads will allow your team to concentrate on the best, rather than the weak.

You can also include qualifying questions and keep track of the leads that have shown interest to entice them further as they move through your sales funnel.

What you can do:

• Create a lead scoring system. Most marketing automation software will come with a CRM that allows you to score your leads based on engagement, data, and more.
• Only call leads that have high engagement with your brand or content and fit your ideal buyer persona.

Failing to Keep up with Evolving Purchasing Cycles

In this digital age, customers have the power to shop multiple goods and services providers, and more than ever, or not beholden to one brand. If you fail to keep up with this break-neck shopping pace, you will inevitably stumble.

Maintaining an active communication line with the sales and marketing department will provide useful feedback on where you could be losing consumers during the selling process. It will enable them to know at what point a customer was most interested in buying finalisation and how they can nurture that interest.

In today’s marketing environment, it is about keeping the interest of your prospect at every phase of the purchasing cycle. To do this, you will need to provide a great experience with valuable content targeted to each stage.