I just saw a chart this week that surprised me initially. Yes, it did! It indicated that 69% of marketers are still having challenges generating quality leads for sales. My initial thought was: “Say what? With all the data that’s available from on-line marketing efforts like SEO, email, social media, and even PURL technology from traditional direct mail campaigns, generating quality leads should be easier than ever today? Right?”

As I ponder this question in relation to my own experiences with B2B lead generation, I realize there are several challenges us marketers face that could affect quality lead generation.  Are you currently facing these challenges, because they can significantly impact your lead generation programs?

1.  Are you analyzing your marketing data?

As I stated earlier, on-line marketing is much less of a challenge to measure today.  For example, you can see real-time results of email campaigns, and if they are tied to your web site, unveil even more insight from web analytics.  Additionally, traditional marketing like direct mail is now enhanced with on-line capabilities like PURL technology (personalized URLs) to help gather more information from recipients for better targeted, more personalized marketing campaigns. 

Today’s CRM and marketing automation systems are becoming more and more sophisticated with centralizing multi-channel marketing efforts for better insight.  You are able to look at this data and analyze it to create more targeted campaigns that significantly increase lead quality.

2. Sales says the leads are no good.

 Ah, this is a fun one! Often times, sales and marketing are two separate departments who in some cases don’t even talk to each other; so their definition of a low-quality lead is probably not the marketer’s.  Let’s look at the solution – work with (not against or without) sales to determine what a high quality lead is.  I have always worked hand in hand with sales to first determine the criteria for a “quality lead” and then examine campaign results and tweak as needed. If sales is involved in the lead generation campaign process, believe me, there will be less talk about a lead being “low quality” because they’ve helped set the “standards.”

As marketing evolves more and more challenges arise, however, I wanted to keep the post short but am very interested to hear about your marketing challenges, especially regarding quality lead generation.