Marketers and business owners understand the importance of generating leads, and that’s why 50% of marketers consider it a top priority. However, generating leads is just the first step in getting paying customers for your business. The journey of nurturing leads into customers is fraught with big challenges.

In this blog post, we’ve highlighted the top five biggest challenges you may come across in your funnel and lead generation activities—and how you can avoid them.

Let’s jump in.

The Biggest Obstacles to Winning New Customers

When it comes down to it, there are several obstacles that could prevent you from converting a lead to a customer. Below are the most challenging ones we have come across.

Knowing The Needs of Your Leads

Understanding the needs of your leads informs how you nurture them through your sales funnel. Without this knowledge, selling to your leads becomes a herculean task. Without enough information and customer insights, it’s easy to lose sight of what you should be feeding your leads.

Start by setting up a good lead capture system to gather the essential information about your leads. Website forms allow you to track what you need, like name, email address, industry, budget, etc., so you can understand who you’re selling to. Avoid getting third-party information and verify details to rule out inconsistencies, as conflicting information makes your selling ineffective.

Spend time learning about your target market, its pain points, and needs. With these, you will be able to create a targeted sales pitch that resonates with your prospects.

Addressing Their Needs

It is one thing to know the needs of your audience, and it is another to develop a sales process that speaks to the identified needs. When you create content that does not speak directly to these needs, you are creating an obstacle that will make it hard for leads to become paying customers.

Understand what interests and motivates your prospects, then craft targeted content addressing these specific needs. Your content could come in the form of blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, or even just helpful social media updates. The key is that your content should be relevant and valuable to your target audience.

Building Trust

In a world brimming with misleading information, trust is fast becoming a top currency for customers when choosing businesses to patronize. 53% of consumers will consider trust after pricing, while 70% say trust is far more important than ever.

Your leads must believe that you have their best interests at heart and that you’ll deliver on your promises, brand, and quality of your product or service. To build trust, be transparent about your products, process, offerings, and pricing. Also, communicate with your audience consistently and deliver on your promises.

Providing the Right Education and Resources

For most businesses, prospects have difficulty getting the right tools and resources to help them understand what a business does and what its products and services are about. You should have a mix of content to help prospects learn more about your business and what you offer.

At each stage of your funnel, have a variety of content that prospects can consume in different ways. Also, offer helpful resources that will provide value to your prospects and help them save time as they learn about you.

Keeping Them as Customers

Your lead has finally made a purchase. Does it end there? No. Most businesses relentlessly pursue the first sale and then back off after that happens. However, you don’t just need your lead to make a purchase—you need to keep them as customers, too, so they can keep coming back to you for what they need.

Keep in touch consistently with your leads, offer outstanding customer service, respond promptly to queries and concerns, and be transparent about important information. These actions will make your customers feel appreciated and that you care about their business.

How to Turn Leads Into Customers

1. Use a CRM to Track Key Lead Details 

A CRM gives you a clear picture of what your leads are interested in and how they interact with your content and website. This information helps you to score and qualify your leads so you can identify the right-follow up methods. The result is more investment in leads that are more likely to buy.

Also, from the insights you glean from content interaction, you can see which content and content format are popular amongst your audience. This knowledge can drive the creation of more optimized and targeted content that speaks directly to your prospects.

With the data collected from website behavior, you can adjust both your website and your marketing strategy accordingly for the best results.  

2. Use Marketing Automation Tools 

As your business grows, so do your leads and lead-generation activities. With the increased volume, it gets challenging to keep track of all your leads manually and identify which ones are qualified and which ones aren’t.

With marketing automation, you can automatically tag your prospects based on actions that you specify or their engagement level. Once your prospects fulfill set actions and conditions, they’re automatically moved from one stage of the funnel to the next.

Not only does this save you the time you would have spent doing this manually, but it also provides you with enough data to craft personalized outreach campaigns informed by set qualifiers to your prospects.

3. Create Nurturing Drip Campaigns 

Businesses that remain top of mind for their audiences enjoy repeat purchases, trust, increased brand value, and loyalty, among other things. Whether you are targeting prospects or existing customers, it’s important to have a system in place to remain top of mind.

One tried, and true way to stay top of mind is through good-old email marketing. Create automated email series and drip campaigns to send to your leads at defined intervals. The goal of these campaigns is to nurture your leads over time and keep you top of mind for when they are ready to become customers.

Our drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to create and set your automated series in motion. Also, you can keep track of your drip campaign’s performance with built-in reporting and make any adjustments when necessary.

4. Stay Top-of-Mind with Consistent Outreach

With consistent outreach, you build your credibility and position yourself as the go-to expert in your industry. Reach out to your prospects via email with the right content when they are ready to hear from you.

With your CRM, you can access detailed lead tracking and data that covers the history of each lead. This includes their interactions with your touchpoints and the kinds of content they have engaged with. Armed with this information, you can regularly reach prospects with content relevant to their needs and where they are in the funnel or buyer’s journey.

Essentially, you earn the trust of your prospects and can achieve top-of-mind awareness, resulting in sales when they’re ready to purchase.

5. Create Retention Campaigns 

Customer retention is important for any business. Businesses can look to gain up to a 25% increase in business revenue if they can retain just 10% of their customers. Imagine how much more your business value would increase if you could retain more than 5%.

Create various retention campaigns to keep existing clients happy, satisfied, and returning for more. You can offer discounts, give customers exclusive perks, or even a re-engagement gift for dormant customers.

These kinds of campaigns help you to retain your customers and reduce customer churn, which, if not addressed, can kill your business. 

Without question, generating leads is important to keep your business going. However, if you are not converting these leads into customers, then you’re sitting on a huge wasted opportunity. If you’re having trouble converting leads to customers, sign up for a free Benchmark Email account and get access to all our great email marketing and lead generation tools.