7 Common Mistakes in Outbound Lead Generation

Are you struggling to generate leads for your business? If so, you're not alone. Many businesses find it difficult to attract new customers through outbound lead generation techniques. In this blog post, we will discuss 7 common mistakes that people make when trying to generate leads via outbound strategies.

Are you new to the world of outbound lead generation? In a previous post, we’ve explained to you everything you need to know about outbound lead generation.

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Mistake #01: Wrong Ideal Customer Profile

Creating accurate buyer personas is essential to the success of any lead generation campaign. It can help you target and reach the right people with the content they want to receive.

Even when you can easily reach large audiences with a method like cold emailing, you should still have a good idea of which market segments you want to target. Otherwise, you’d be wasting valuable resources by reaching out to people who do not want or need whatever you are offering.

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Mistake #02: Using The Wrong Tools

This is a big one. If you ask the strongest person on earth to undo a screw, they can break all their nails and teeth without finding success. Tell a small child to do so but using a screwdriver, and they’ll do it in seconds. Why? Because tools matter. A lot.

When considering which tools and which softwares to use, keep the following in mind:

• Usability (Is it intuitive and user-friendly, allowing you to get your campaigns up and running efficiently?)
• Integration (Does it integrate with other marketing tools in your tech stack?)
• Pricing
• Features

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Mistake #03: Long Messages

 This one is most applicable to cold emails and social selling.

Internet users today, and this applies to B2B buyers too, have little time and short attention spans. If your message is too long, there’s a very good chance it will not be read.

From our experience, we’ve found a simple heuristic: keep it short and hit it right on the snout with every word you use. Some of our best performing emails were only 3 sentences in total, but those 3 sentences hit the pain-points, benefits and relevancy all at once.

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Mistake #04: Not Providing Value

The most successful forms of outbound messages are those that benefit prospects. Besides being a great way to connect with a potential customer and get your message through, providing value is so important because it is very rarely done. So if you can do it effectively, it’ll definitely set you apart from everyone else competing for your customer’s attention and money.

Try to keep the focus of your outbound lead generation content on the recipient, their wants and needs, and how you can satisfy them. Avoid talking extensively about your own company or brand, or about what you’ve done in the past.

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Mistake #05: Not Pushing Hard Enough

You should always pair your outbound lead generation strategies with some sort of inbound demand strategy so that you have a solid sales funnel in place.

With cold emails, for example, one of the most common mistakes we see is people sending out emails and going completely silent. You should be ready to follow up and guide potential customers down your funnel to maximize effectiveness.

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Mistake #06: Pushing Too Hard

Remember, you’re looking for a match. If someone is clearly uninterested – say you’ve already sent several emails and they haven’t replied or they expressly said they’re not interested, the best you can do is move on and spend your effort and resources on other leads. Just like with dating, there are plenty of fish in the sea.

On that note: A great benefit of many outbound lead generation tactics, is the fact that they allow you to cast a wide net. If some fish slip through, there are plenty more to be caught.

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Mistake #08: Not Making Your Communication Personalized

One of the biggest mistakes we see is marketers addressing other humans like robots. They expect to send them loads of information and have them accept it with a smile. The opposite usually happens, and stale communication gets disregarded. Therefore, make sure you always personalize your cold outreach.

Final Thoughts

We hope you enjoyed reading and that you’ll be able to avoid making these mistakes in your outbound lead generation efforts! If you'd like to get started with outbound lead generation but don't know where to start, feel free to book a call with one of our experts. We'll be more than happy to help you out!

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