Ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels when it comes to lead generation?

You’ve hired smart people, you’ve gathered and crunched data, and you’re motivating your team to generate as many calls as possible per day.

But transforming a call into a lead (and then transforming that lead into a sale) continues to be a frustrating puzzle for many lead generators, sales teams, and managers.

Let’s face it, though, you’re not alone: The world of lead generation has experienced significant new challenges in recent years.

To face down these lead generation problems, we’ve compiled a list of the biggest ones standing in the way of successful B2B sales strategies. And we’ve also added our top tips for overcoming these lead gen pain points and driving new growth.

Facing 5 of the most difficult challenges in lead generation

Let’s explore five of the top challenges for businesses generating their own leads, as well as tips for surmounting those lead-generation problems, improving productivity, and driving results.

1. Having Accurate Data

One of the most important tools for lead generation is a centralized, up-to-date marketing database. A good marketing database will substantially increase your lead generation’s success. And, efficiently managing your leads with robust data analytics is imperative to driving the most value and profit from your efforts. (Let’s hear it for ROI!)

Making sure your salespeople have the right information can also help to generate internal conversations between different parts of the staff, increasing productivity. As the lead passes from generators to sales reps, each member of the team can suggest new clients, or add points that help to refine the messaging. This generates a strong informational loop and a greater sense of teamwork.

A strong database is a good first step towards providing your team with the right tools, the right systems, and the right people in order to generate profits.

The Scourge of Lead Fraud

These days, however, having highly accurate data has become a more complex proposition thanks to the proliferation of lead generation fraud. This is when fraudsters use bots, malware, and even human-led fraud farms to falsely fill in online forms.

Not only will lead generators be unable to convert these fraudulent leads but they’ll open themselves to a range of compliance issues and potential violations. Add to these risks the potential reputational damages and increased acquisition costs posed by lead fraud, and the huge problems of this ongoing lead generation challenge become quite clear.

In addition to tracking your data with analytics, protect your ad campaigns by employing an ad fraud detection solution like Anura.

2. Generating Enough Qualified Leads

Having accurate leads is one thing. But you also need to have enough of those accurate leads. On the one hand, getting those qualified leads is about having the right targeting:

Who are you talking to, and what are you talking to them about? A good lead generator understands the importance of targeted marketing—spending time talking with someone who has a genuine interest in your product or service. There’s a reason companies with strong lead nurturing campaigns report higher ROI than those who don’t.

One way to improve your targeting is to listen to your top customers. Hearing specific stories of individual customers’ needs creates a deeper knowledge of your target markets and their issues. This can help you to form a picture of who your client base really is, what challenges they face themselves, and how your services can help. Lead generation tactics can then grow out of this deep knowledge and be more finely tuned and targeted to the markets you want to enter.

Driving Higher Contact Rates

On the other hand, to qualify for more quality leads, you also need to be able to contact them successfully. And for many lead generators, that’s not so easy these days.

One of the biggest challenges faced by B2B and B2C lead generators alike is the rise of call blocking and flagging. When your phone calls are labeled as potential spam, even the warmest leads are unlikely to pick up. That’s why, without the right caller ID reputation management practices in place, this problem has a devastating impact on contact rates. Because let’s face it, you can have the best marketing database in the world, but if you can’t reach people, there’s no conversation; and with no convo, there’s no conversion.

In the meantime, even with the right caller ID management approach, you need to move quickly and efficiently, driving speed to lead. The longer you wait to contact, the lower your contact rates are likely to be. And that means you need the right dialer software—one that can automatically prioritize your most important leads.

3. Shaping the Conversation

Finding a good balance between the number of calls you make and how good those calls are is a huge challenge in lead generation. Using a dynamic scripting tool not only trains but guides agents to say the right thing at the right time in the flow of conversation.

A good lead generation call center agent should have a high number of conversations (possibly 120-170 calls per day/per rep), but he or she also needs those conversations to pay off with solid connections.

Be sure you’re tracking the right KPIs to monitor agent performance. Are your lead generators connecting with actual people when they call, or just leaving messages? Are they spending enough time with each call to really talk and develop relationships when having conversations? It’s worthless if you have 10 live conversations and each one is only 30 seconds long, but if you have 10 live conversations that, combined, make up 4 hours of talk time, that can lead to solid inquiries, and qualify enough people to reach your quota.

4. Turning Qualified Leads Into Sales

Providing data, having productive conversations, and generating leads can all help set up your sales team to close the deal.

But how do you transform a lead into a sale?

One key is communication between sales and marketing: if everyone is on the same page, there will be a more efficient deployment of resources that can lead to sales. When each part of the team collaborates on phone calls and voicemails, direct market campaigns, and other sorts of outreach, there’s a better chance for each end of the process to work in harmony with the other.

Be sure you are tracking the right lead management KPIs as well and make those metrics the basis for strategic decisions.

5. Hiring, Training, and Equipping the Right Salespeople

Providing salespeople or outbound call center agents with accurate data and qualified leads and arming them (and their managers!) with effective tools is essential for meeting company sales goals.

But do you have the right people in place to begin with, and are you providing them with the training and evaluation they need to succeed?

We think one reason salespeople sometimes can’t meet quotas is that owners often hope prior sales experience among their reps will fill any knowledge gaps about a given product. However, sales experience in one area might not translate to another.

What’s needed is a common set of expectations that are constantly reviewed, updated, and utilized to help the salesperson improve his or her performance. An effective lead generation operation will provide its sales staff with the right scripts, and teach them how to overcome customer objections and ask the right questions.

And the training doesn’t stop with the first call. There should be consistent coaching of sales reps through reviewing their calls and identifying and correcting mistakes that were made. Consistent benchmarking of results can clarify expectations and keep everyone on the same page. Meanwhile, the implementation of AI-powered sales QA tools can help automate and streamline much of this feedback and improvement process.