15+1 Critical Mistakes in
Lead Generation You
Better Avoid
Lyuba Lazarenko
FerraStudios.com

“The biggest mistake I ever made when it comes to lead
generation is not starting early enough. I’ve only recently
been doubling down on proactively inviting people to
subscribe to my updates on SujanPatel.com. I wish I would
have started five years ago.”
Sujan Patel, Co-founder of ContentMarketer.io
Influencer says:

3 Common Mistakes for Technology Companies
1
Assigning cold calling
to a sales rep
Making the salesperson do cold calling is a
complete waste of sales resources.
Cold calling is actually a completely ineffective
activity for a technology company that offers
services such as IT outsourcing.

3 Common Mistakes for Technology Companies
2
Isolating an individual
responsible for lead
generation from the
rest of the company
No matter how well he/she does the task,
information sharing should be open and all updates
should be directly communicated in a timely
manner.

3 Common Mistakes for Technology Companies
3
Hiring a call center to
do cold calling
Call centers rely on scripts and predictable
requests. Technology companies are in a highly
dynamic market where communication by a pre-
defined scenario is useless.
For successful lead generation, the process must
be ensured by readily available technology
expertise and deep product knowledge.

Serious Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid
4
Not defining your
Ideal Customer
This is the critical root cause of most (if not all)
failures of lead generation initiatives. The lack of a
developed customer profile leads to unclear
messaging and completely wrong targeting.

“It’s never too early to create an ideal customer hypothesis
and start testing against that rather than throwing a bunch
of random stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks”.
Customer Success Evangelist, Lincoln Murphy
Influencer says:

“Lead gen’s pretty hard anyway, but if you’re targeting
the wrong people, you’re not going to get anywhere.
Make sure you know exactly who your ideal prospect is.”
Jake Peters, the influencer and CEO at Contentacle
Influencer says:

Serious Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid
5
Lack of content
strategy
74% of B2B marketers use content marketing
to generate leads. No strategy — all your
efforts are in vain.
Marketers focus heavily on creating a great
content and assuming leads will magically
appear and convert into paying customers
without managing the process “behind the
curtains”.
Failing to read the customer data and inability
to align it with the content strategy leads to
releasing the content irrelevant to a target
audience.

Serious Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid
6
Landing page with
product features
instead of benefits
Nobody wants to read about how cool your
product is if it does not offer benefits that suit
customers’ needs.
There are so many websites that still focus on how
cool their products are, forgetting about what is in
there for potential customers. Often that mistake is
due to not knowing your customer.

Serious Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid
7
Many Calls-to-Action
on a single landing
page
Putting a few links or call-to-action buttons on one
landing page confuses the visitor and will distract
them from converting. Usually such landing pages
do not convert at all and are useless for marketers.
Landing pages should have only ONE main focus.
That means removing navigation or header bars
from your page and keeping it simple to maximize
conversions.

Serious Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid
8
No Call-to-Action on
a landing page
Every page of your website should have a call-to-
action in order to increase the possibility to
capture your lead while he/she is on your website.
If landing page is not a specifically crafted
(promoting a webinar, eBook etc.), the call-to-
action can be as simple as Subscribe, Contact, Let’s
talk, or Ask us more, etc.

Example of hidden or non existent Call-to-Action

Serious Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid
9
Long and tedious lead
capture form
Time-consuming and over-complicated forms kill
conversions. Use asterisks to show visitors which
fields you require and eliminate every field you do
not desperately need at the start of your
relationship.
Some experts advise keeping forms up to five
fields, but I say that three is enough.
And since now everyone has a social media
account, it is good to add a social login option to
your regular form.

Serious Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid
10
Ignoring the specifics
of a channel
Every channel serves different needs specific to the
channel:
• LinkedIn is the best for B2B marketing and
growing professional networking.
• Facebook is best for building a loyal brand
community.
• Twitter for creating brand awareness and
gaining followers.
To run a successful lead generation campaign,
marketers should craft their messages and tone
specific to the channel.

“The biggest mistake I had to deal with was the thinking
that the channel does not work for a business instead of
adjusting the approach to the channel and testing
again.”
Benji Hyam, Director of Growth Marketing at Everwise
Influencer says:

Serious Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid
11
Forgetting mobile
users
Today not having a landing page mobile responsive
greatly decreases the chances for the visitors to
convert.
Pay attention to content optimization for mobile
users, create very simple forms and call-to-action
and make their phone number clickable.

Example of mobile responsive
landing page

Serious Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid
12
Making assumptions
about your target
audience
Assuming that we know our target audience just
because we may be one of them is a dead wrong
approach. Instead, marketers better reach out and
talk to their customers and prospects.
Ask your audience what they like or dislike, get into
open discussions with them. The more you talk,
the more insight about them you get.

Serious Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid
13
Running for quantity
vs quality
Unless your product is a universal thing that fits
everybody on the planet, your biggest mistake
would be chasing the quantity of leads while
ignoring their quality.
Quality leads are the ones that fit into the
description of your ideal buyer profile and have a
much higher chance of being converted into a
customer.

“The biggest mistake I’ve made is encouraging clients to go for more
leads instead of better-quality leads.
I’ve run split-tests on lead generation pages in which we experimented
with the number of form fields to complete… and our success metric
was form completions. So we’d choose a winner based on the number
of leads, not how those leads did or did not convert. That’s
problematic…”
Joanna Wiebe, a Founder of CopyHackers
Influencer says:

Serious Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid
14
Neglect using a CRM
system
If you are just starting your lead generation and
nurturing campaign and only have up to 20
contacts, it is okay not to invest in complex CRM
systems.
When your Excel spread sheet has over 50 contacts
and increasing, your lead communication programs
tend to get hectic. Even the simplest CRM systems
out there offer enough automaton and planning
tools that help in doing effective lead generation
and nurturing.

Serious Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid
15
Not automating
Any marketing manual work turns into a
routine that inevitably leads to decreasing
efficiency of marketing efforts. That is why you
need to start automating. There are many
marketing automation tools out there:
HubSpot, BuzzSumo, Buffer, Hootsuite.
You can collect user’s data and all kinds of
useful analytics, track a user’s behaviour on
various channels and nurture your leads in the
funnel using email marketing tactics that often
are recommended by the software.

“I think a lot of businesses and people either don’t know where to start,
or they worry that their list just simply won’t grow. But there are a ton of
awesome, cost-effective tools available now that can help with
optimizing the entire lead generation process. If you can provide enough
value on your blog and in your emails, people will sign up — but you have
to be organized, you have to have a strategy, you have to be consistent
and you have to start capturing emails now”.
Sujan Patel, Co-founder of ContentMarketer.io
Main Mistake: Loosing time

Alternative to Lead Generation
Buy Your Leads
No time for tedious leads generation?
Buy them.
But be very careful about that.
Big listings tend to have a large percentage of
contacts that are invalid or do not meet your ideal
buyer criteria.
However, you can benefit from services that offer
targeted leads specifically for your product
(e.g. 1000leads.com)

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