What are the biggest lead generation challenges your small business faces? Here’s what businesses in a recent survey say are their top hurdles—and some solutions to help you overcome these obstacles.
Problem: Finding a strategy, tactics, or offer that gets the attention of potential leads. Forty-two percent of businesses say this is a problem, making this the number-one challenge in lead generation.
Solution: Get to know your target customers. What are their demographics, interests, needs, budgets and pain points? What problems does your business solve for them? Where do they look for companies like yours when making a purchase? The more you know about your target customer and how they buy, the better you will be at developing successful lead generation strategies, tactics and offers. For example, if you know your target customers typically do an online search to find nearby businesses, your business can generate more leads by using Lead Stream to get found on local search engines like Google Maps, Yahoo and Bing.
Problem: Measuring and documenting lead generation success. More than 31 percent of businesses have difficulty measuring how well they’re doing at lead generation.
Solution: Don’t just throw time and money at lead generation efforts. It’s essential to track how many leads you generate, how many sales you close, sales revenue, how long your typical sales cycle is and other key performance indicators. When you use Lead Stream, you always know how many leads you can expect, and you get an easy-to-use dashboard where you can monitor the performance of your account. Pay-per-click (PPC ads) show you exactly where your leads are coming from, and Lead Stream helps your ads get top placement.
Problem: Responding to inquiries in a timely manner; managing and tracking leads. About 30 percent of businesses struggle with these issues.
Solution: There’s no substitute for investing in the human resources you need to respond to leads. However, automated sales solutions can help you make the most of your staff’s time. For example, using chat bots on your webpage to reach out to leads can save your employees time while still qualifying leads. You can also set up automated emails to follow up with leads. Choose and use good customer relationship management (CRM) software that helps you track leads and actions taken.
If your business suffers from these three common lead generation problems, you’re not alone. Fortunately, taking some simple steps can help you resolve your problems and get more leads.
Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash
Author information
Rieva Lesonsky
Rieva Lesonsky is CEO of GrowBiz Media, a media and custom content company focusing on small business and entrepreneurship.
