Trouble Getting Enough Leads? Be Clever And Take These 3 Steps Back!

During the last two years I worked at LinkedIn, the most commonly occurring challenge I heard was companies not being able to generate a sufficient amount of leads and appointments. In my experience, many organizations focus a lot of resources on closing more deals but less so on opening new pipeline. They’d invest heavily into sales trainers or high salaries for the best sales reps. However, in spite of its importance, lead generation would usually not be approached as strategically. Since closing deals requires finding and speaking with the right people first, lacking leads means slower business growth. Especially over the last few years, cold calling has been declared dead, mass-marketing is becoming less effective, and the actual ROI of attending industry events is often relatively low.

Based on the many conversations I’ve had with both sales and marketing leaders, there is usually one overarching reason why lead generation is a problem: they haven’t really thought it through very well. In this article, I will provide a simple framework to help you take a step back and rethink what matters most to both sales reps and marketers: how they can get more and better leads.

1) Ask why, preferably five times.

Before you start thinking about some great new ideas to get that lead generation engine all fired up, it is important to understand why your organization is generating an insufficient amount of new quality pipeline. Let’s have a look at the following made-up conversation between a Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) and the marketing manager (MM) that reports to her:

MM: "It looks like we are missing both our MQL and SQL target for this quarter again. I don’t know what to do anymore."

CCO: "I’m sure we can solve this. Why do you think that is?"

MM: "Well, first of all, the data shows that we are actually over performing on our website visitors target but we aren’t even near our MQL target, let alone our SQL target."

CCO: "OK, let’s talk top of the funnel first. So you’re saying the amount of people visiting our website is pretty high but once they’re there, they don’t fill out a form. Why would they not be inclined to engage with us?"

Stop there. There are many possible reasons why website visitors don’t do what you want them to do. It could be lack of valuable content, it could that your website isn’t intuitive, it could be your call-to-action is unclear, it could even be that many of the wrong people visit your website, or a thousand-and-one other reasons. Before you can fix anything, you have to know what part is broken first. To get there, you have to ask why. Toyota have come up with a process for finding the root cause of a problem by asking “why” five times when discussing a very specific matter. As the richest man alive (Jeff Bezos from Amazon) swears by this approach, I would strongly recommend you start doing that too!

2) Focus on strategy before tactics.

The great Chinese general Sun Tzu (544-496 BC) once said: 

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

Even today, the difference between tactics and strategy can feel pretty ambiguous. Coming up with a strategy means you're mapping out the route that takes you from where you are to where you want to be. Tactics, on the other hand, would be the moves you're making while you're following the predetermined route. In this context, your marketing strategy could mean:

1. In order to increase revenue, we are going to transform into an inbound marketing machine
2. In order to increase revenue, we are going to focus on acquiring X new customers
3. In order to increase revenue, we are going to grow our market share by X percentage

It depends on what you feel is the best way to achieve what should always be marketing's ultimate goal: positioning your product or service in such a way that you grow the business. Unfortunately, many organizations out there, especially small to medium sized companies, have not figured out what their overall marketing or lead generation strategy should look like. You can make all the moves you want (tactics), but if you don't know what the road to success looks like, you're probably not going to get where you want to be.

Tactics become important once you've figured out how you're going to achieve your goal. However, you have to make sure that your marketing tactics play right into your marketing strategy. In other words, your moves should make following your set route as easy as possible. Let's say your strategy focusses on acquiring X new customers. Sensible tactics would be:

1. In order to acquire new customers, we are going to target certain audiences on LinkedIn
2. In order to acquire new customers, we are going to run a brand awareness campaign
3. In order to acquire new customers, we need our sales team to start prospecting

3) Start measuring the right metrics.

The best marketing leaders out there know exactly how much they're really contributing to the revenue numbers, how they got there, what strategic initiatives to double down on and what activities might not be the use of their resources. HubSpot have outlined perfectly what marketing metrics should really matter to a CEO.

Whereas more and more marketers do measure metrics in general, they're often not the most important ones. For example, many marketers would spend too much time on non-critical KPIs such as:

1. Email open rates and click-through rates
2. Number of website visitors
3. Number of followers on LinkedIn company page

Yes, those KPIs are relevant. They tell you whether your email communication, website or social media presence is on the right track. However, they do not directly relate to revenue contribution, which means your marketing team will be getting bogged down in tactics rather than strategic output, but more on this later. Since there are only so many hours in a day, more often than not a narrow mindset will have an impact on the amount of leads generated. On the other hand, examples of clever key marketing metrics would be:

1. Overall percentage of revenue sourced
2. Number of trial signups or appointment requests sourced
3. Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

My guess is that when your marketing team is being held accountable for actual number of appointment requests sourced rather than sheer number of website visitors, their priorities will shift. Marketing and sales will become much more aligned, more qualified leads will start flowing in, resulting in more quality pipeline and subsequently stronger sales!