By: Joyce Ong, founder of MarketingTech
This article discusses the lead generation challenges most business owners and their sales teams face at some point in their journey, and explains how lead tracking will help save time, energy, and money.
Lead generation is a marketing activity that businesses carry out to acquire new customers and new business. If done successfully, it can help a business grow and scale in ways that traditional word of mouth, introductions or referrals can’t do as quickly
However, lead generation can be frustrating and time-consuming. Here are seven main reasons why.
1. No lead tracking or lead attribution: we lose track of where our leads come from
In our daily business life, we meet many people, both online and offline. Have you ever received new business seemingly out of nowhere, and at the back of your mind, wished you could thank the person who helped you? If we don’t track where our leads come from or attribute our leads to where they originate from, we won’t be able to nurture a relationship with the people who support us, which can be a missed opportunity.
2. Wasting time with low quality leads
One of the most common reasons for this is networking in groups that may not be appropriate for who you want to target. For example, you might attend an event for startups when really, you’re looking to build relationships with well-established companies.
Low-quality leads can also come from unclear marketing messages or undercharging and attracting customers who’re not the right fit.
Essentially, it’s important to be strategic and clear about your target audience and seek out the places where they are present.
3. Networking events that aren’t productive
Networking events can be a bit of a hit and miss sometimes.
Don’t get me wrong, they can be enjoyable, allow us to meet interesting people, and provide collaborative opportunities. However, other times they may not be as productive. If we think about the times we’ve spent attending events over the course of weeks, months, and years, it all adds up. That’s why it’s important to know how many leads, how much business or how many collaborations you’ve achieved from each type of event you’ve attended, so that you can make more effective choices.
4. Costly membership fees
When signing up for memberships, they often seem like a great idea. When you review your business expenses, they might instead look like an indulgence or, worse, a waste of time. Just like that gym membership we take up but lose interest in later, what about the networking memberships, or the business club membership we’ve been paying for? Have they helped our business? If so, how?
When it’s time to renew the membership dues, how do we know if we should? Or should we invest the money somewhere else, somewhere we’ll generate business, better quality leads, or productive collaborations?
5. Limited marketing budget and time
Small business owners often have limited budget and time to invest in marketing activities. Faced with these constraints, we want to try and make sure we’re using our budget well and choose the activities that are most likely to generate results
These decisions can be very difficult to make.
There are so many options: face-to-face networking events, exhibitions, conferences, digital marketing strategies, social media, and more. How do we cut through the chase, ditch the time wasters, and get to our goals faster without making costly mistakes?
6. Unpredictable sales
How do we reduce the feast and famine of running a business, which is disheartening and stressful? How do we avoid relying on that one client to pay our bills?
If we want to grow our business, we need to keep the sales pipeline going. Waiting for referrals or for word-of-mouth to find its way to us can work, but we can’t control it or plan around it. A robust sales pipeline is dependent on your ability to generate good quality leads, consistently.
7. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are great but…
Be honest – how much of your CRM do you use? 10% 20% 50% or all of it?
I’d say I’ve used at most 20% of the full capability of my CRM system. Someday, I tell myself, I’ll get round to exploring and utilising my CRM properly. But that someday may not happen, and as time passes, I continue to pay for the software regardless of how much or how little I use.
I like my CRM tool, but I wanted something simpler, something that’s pre-sales pipeline and captures top of the funnel early stage leads well without cluttering up my pipeline.
Do you experience the same problem with your CRM?
Here’s a solution to your lead generation challenges – a lead tracking and lead attribution software
There you have it, I’ve outlined the seven challenges businesses tend to face at some point in their growth journey. We’ve all been there. The point is that if we don’t take some time tracking our leads, or do a lead attribution exercise, it can be tricky to know what we should focus on, and which activities to cut down or stop altogether.
I started tracking my leads on a spreadsheet a few years ago and was amazed at the result. I now know what my top three lead generation channels are and the return on investment for each of those channels, which has helped me develop a laser sharp focus to my marketing. First appearances can be deceiving. Sometimes, activities that appear to generate many leads don’t convert well at all, whereas activities that generate just a few leads convert easily.
But I realised spreadsheets can be clunky and don’t easily allow me to analyse my lead generation data visually. Nor do spreadsheets allow me to slice and dice my data in ways that will help me plan and make better decisions.
So, I developed a tool called LeadTracker. You can learn more about it and how you could try it for your business by clicking below, but the most important thing is to start tracking your leads in whatever way works for you!
Learn more about LeadTracker
What is LeadTracker?
LeadTracker is a simple platform and channel agnostic tool (not a customer relationship management tool or CRM) that does ONE thing for your business: it helps you track, measure, and analyse all your lead generation activities, online or offline. This means that you and your team will make data-driven decisions on the marketing activities to invest your time, energy, and money on.
What LeadTracker isn’t
It’s not a CRM – there are loads out there with plenty of great features. You can plug the lead generation data you’ve gathered from LeadTracker into your CRM, if you want. It doesn’t help you generate leads, but will help you track, measure, and analyse your lead generation activities. It’s not expensive or complicated to use, like some CRM systems can be, and there’s no training required to use it.
I guarantee your lead generation will be transformed when you start using it consistently. You can try it out for free, for up to 3 months or when you’ve uploaded 30 leads for tracking. By that time, I hope you’ll be able to start reaping the benefits of using a lead tracking and lead attribution software.
If you’d like to give the tool a go, you can access LeadTracker right away. By using LeadTracker, you’ll get clarity and achieve focus with your lead generation. Your lead generation challenges will soon disappear!
Please don’t forget to connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know what you think of LeadTracker.
*We strive to do our best when supporting small business and their growth. Our business databases can give you information and data that can help you with advertising, market research, company information, and industry factsheets. If you have already taken the plunge, we would love for you to join us at a seminar, our workshops cover digital marketing, business model canvas and planning, demystifying taxes and intellectual property to name a few. Visit our events page or website for more information.
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