To recognize, pick out and qualify a lead as a new likely customer can be one of the most daunting tasks that you’ll ever face while building your business as an entrepreneur. Lead generation process done poorly will result in squandering a large amount of money. On the flipside, if done flawlessly, lead generation can take your business from start-up to company with rapid growth.

Generating the right lead is not easy. If it was easy everybody would do it. And everyone would know who the right prospect to sell to is. You’re going to face lots of challenges as an entrepreneur when generating leads for sales. And from a quality standpoint to a quantitative one. It’s tough out there. That doesn’t mean that you should just give up. Or totally ignore lead generation in total and go with your gut feeling.

You’ll be in a much more comfortable position and much more confident in approaching measured sales outreach if you recognize the possible lead generation challenges upfront and know how to tackle them when they come across your growth. That’s why we want to point out to 3 of some of the biggest questions that entrepreneurs face when they need to generate new leads for their startup:

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1. Who are they and will they purchase or utilize my product/service?

SaaS (Software as a Service) providers think about this one. Not everyone that you’ll reach out in a B2B lead is your target customer. For instance, you may want to sell some trend prediction software to brokerage and trading companies. Who will you pick as a lead to approach to? Can you find his credentials easily?

Knowing who makes the purchasing decision and who actually will use the service is key in B2B lead generation. Users influence the decision maker and vice versa. The sweet spot here is to have something that both of them would be interested in and qualify both of them into your list.

2. Do I have the right strategy or tactic that will take me to the right leads?

The strategy that will help you find the right prospects should be the backbone of your sales process. Spending money on various strategies and tactics just to test them out will do no good for your business if you’re on a limited budget. Constant testing can eventually lead to a loss of funds and no leads. And it is too risky to test in today’s market anyway.

The best lead generation tactic is the one that will ensure you and your team that you have on your list the ones that need you the most, not the ones that kind of need you. Remember, quality over quantity is the main rule when it comes to lead generation.

3. Can I track and measure the process of lead generation?

You cannot operate on hunches and intuition when your process generates data. Yes, the gut feeling can help invent and develop a solution to a problem. Having that instinct is very important when you need to make a decision as an entrepreneur, but the data doesn’t lie in 99% of the cases. Especially when it comes to markets and sales.

Analytics is what you need to rely on if you want to develop a solid lead generation process that will deliver the results for you. As a result, market research has become a necessity and an immensely important aspect of the business. Having the right data means a bigger opportunity for you to develop a better sales funnel for your leads.

It all comes down to understanding the marketplace. The marketplace has evolved so much that simply measuring just the volume of leads is not enough. Nowadays other important metrics are involved, such as Conversion Rate, Time to Customer Conversion, Cost per Customer, etc.

We really hope that we have made you more aware as an entrepreneur about how important the lead generation is. In fact, this process involves some serious research and hard work. Finally, it’s such a critical process for marketing and sales success that you just can’t let any question remain unanswered.

Do you have more questions on lead generation? Check out our 6-step approach for more.

As a start-up, you need to think long-term and acquire customers that will prove profitable over a lifetime. You need to position your business in the most profitable space in the market and create a huge demand for your product. Alone you’ll spend a huge amount of time on research, digital marketing, testing, and content creation to reach the right leads. You’ve got to ask yourself if you’re experienced enough to do it in your start-up phase. If your answer is “no” then you should consider BizzBee experts to do it for you. Leave the work to professionals while you focus on your product.