Written by Orit Honigsberg | Originally published at Qwory blog.
How well do your challenges match up with your priorities?
I’ll speak for myself – though I think many people would agree with me: The things I want to achieve the most, and are most important to me (and the most rewarding, ultimately), often have the biggest hurdles, or require the most effort.
This can be summed up in a simple statement: If the road is easy, you’re likely going the wrong way. Or, as Gandhi said, “Your struggles develop your strengths”.
The point I want to make is that the link between struggle and achievement is natural. What you most wish to achieve, you’re probably also most willing to work for.
Here’s a little exercise:
List your top 3 goals.
Now, rate each one from 1-5 for priority (1 being low priority, 5 being top).
Then rate the level of challenge each presents from 1-5 (1 being easy, 5 being very challenging).
You’ll probably draw interesting conclusions about how your priorities and challenges relate to each other.
MarketingSherpa did a survey about B2B marketing with this method.
You can examine the order of preference for B2B marketers – what they consider top priority, and the order of the remaining goals. You can analyze what they perceive to be the biggest challenge. Or, you can try to identify the reasons for the discrepancies between priorities and challenges in certain cases.
How about we do all of the above?
Let’s start with the top priority: Lead generation.
Lead generation in B2B marketing is the process of a company’s initiation into a business’s products or services. Leads generally come from the internet, but they can also be a result of external referrals. Usually, a lead consists of the necessary contact information to make the steps towards a sale. Social media is a common platform to gain leads, as most companies are active social network participants these days.
It’s clear enough why this is the top priority: Leads → sales → revenue → $$
But there are, of course, challenges in trying to attain it.
The B2B lead gen struggle generally comes down to problems in a company’s marketing technique, ranging from finding relevant leads to doing the right kind of follow-up.
What is the biggest challenge (and also happens to be the 2nd highest priority)?
Converting the leads into paying customers. (I repeat: leads → sales → revenue → $$.)
In other words, the most two most important things for B2B marketers is locating relevant leads, and making sure they become fruitful connections.
I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at the two strongest correlations.
The closest gaps in priority and challenge – what I just referred to as the strongest correlations – are Lead Qualification and Scoring, and Lead Nurturing. These are the B2B marketing objectives that are almost in equal part priority and challenge.
If you look back at the statistics at the beginning, Lead Qualification is actually slightly more of a challenge than it is a priority! Leads which suit your specific needs and score accurately online are hard to come by. That’s often due to the fact that search engines don’t re-index and re-classify their data as frequently as they should; your best business information might get a little lost in the shuffle.
Lead Nurturing is vital, because it puts you on your potential client’s radar. But it’s also time consuming. Social media engagement is an efficient method for this – but you have to locate each company’s page on multiple platforms.
How can we widen the gap? How can we make sure that our challenges don’t hinder us in attaining our top goals?
Qwory is a solution that targets these issues directly, the exact issues that the research points to as the biggest B2B priorities and challenges. Qwory’s USP is its unique ability to guide the average SBM to find, engage with, and connect with customers. This method helps transition distant leads into paying business customers.
As a business-focused search engine, you can efficiently find relevant leads with a simple keyword search. Qwory combats the issue of lead nurturing by showing all of the company’s contact information next to their search result, so you can engage with them easily.
Once a customer engagement improves, so will their likelihood of sales. Curata’s 2014 tactics study showed that 76 percent of marketers saw an increase in buyer engagement as a direct result of content marketing.
And in terms of lead qualification and scoring, Qwory has an independent database, and indexes more than 1 billion active web pages monthly.
Seeing that challenges and priorities often align -statistically- seems intimidating.
But there are ways to minimize the challenge, ways to lessen the struggle. Both in B2B marketing, and in your daily life.
The HR Tech Weekly® 
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