Top 10 Mistakes That Doom Lead Generation Efforts

Your digital assets aren’t generating worthwhile inquiries and purchased lists aren’t proving their value. What’s going on? Let’s review some common problems.

I’ve fashioned this as a list of top 10 mistakes that doom lead generation efforts, captured from a rich pool of resources around the web.

  1. Overloading landing pages with so many links that the prospect is confused or distracted.
    Time is precious, and if you’re not providing the prospect with a clear pathway, they’re not going to waste time trying to navigate around your site.
  2. You have no hero image that is prominent on a web page to showcase your product or services.
    Humans are a visual lot, so it’s important to have a graphical element that clearly ties your product or service to the problem that the prospect is grappling with.
  3. You haven’t defined the criteria of a good lead.
    BANT—budget, authority, needs and timeline—are traditional indicators of how likely a lead is a match for your product/services. But, particularly with more complex offerings, you need to go beyond BANT to get inside the heads of prospects and try to understand their motivations and challenges.
  4. Not using a dedicated landing page to get visitors to complete a specific objective.
    You need to lead a prospect to a place where they can take the next step, whether that’s filling out an inquiry form, downloading content or signaling their intent. Sending them to the home page is generally a waste of time.
  5. Not focusing your blogs on questions that a prospect might be asking or thinking before ever considering your product or service as a solution.
    Focusing on features and tech specs might appeal to some people, but most prospects want to know if you can solve their problem. That means you have to have an understanding of what they would ask if given the opportunity.
  6. Your content is B2B in the wrong way—Boring 2 Businesspeople.
    If you can’t capture somebody’s attention in the first page of a PDF download or e-book, they’re not likely to find their way to the call to action on page 6.
  7. Sales and marketing teams aren’t speaking the same language.
    This is a sure-fire path to the blame game, whereas sales complains the leads aren’t good and marketing complains that sales doesn’t know how to follow up. There has to be a shared understanding of what makes a good lead.
  8. Expecting marketing tactics to produce results without a clear call to action.
    You may have the best-written description of your product or service, but if you expect the lead is going to pick up the phone as a result, forget about it. You need to make it easy to take the next step, such as visiting a landing page, downloading content, taking a look at case studies, etc.
  9. Not nurturing your leads and failing to maintain contact.
    If you’ve got a good lead, but nobody does anything about it, odds are the sale will go to a competitor somewhere down the line. Somebody has to call or emails needs to be sent periodically to ensure that your product/service is top-of-mind when it comes time to make a decision.
  10. Settling for a lead when you should be leveraging it to find a path to the decision maker.
    The initial lead may not have the authority to make a decision and may even be several rungs below where the decision will ultimately be made. But the lead can point you to the next level and the goal is to continue the journey until you reach the ultimate destination.

In order to connect with decision makers in key accounts, you have to know who they are and what is motivating them. SimplyDIRECT’s demand generation methods rely on a combination of custom-built contacts, web surveys and content marketing to help clients more effectively engage with executives in target accounts.

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