Timeline to Generating Leads: When You’ll See Results
Timing is everything in sales, and you’ve invested time and resources into generating leads for your sales team. So now, you’re understandably feeling the pressure to deliver promised lead generation results—and fast.
The clock is ticking, and your stakeholders want to see proof that your strategy will pay off. How long will it take to convert leads into sales? And how can you keep your sales team motivated while waiting for those results to roll in?
Without a clear timeline, you risk frustration from your sales team, wasted resources, and disappointed stakeholders. And if leads aren’t converting fast enough, revenue targets can quickly slip out of reach.
The Time it Takes to Get From Generating Leads to Closing Deals
The most effective way to shorten your lead generation timeline, is to ensure your targeting is precise, and your sales team has a clear process for engaging warm leads quickly. Get your foundation right—such as clearly defining your target audience and value proposition—and you’ll hit the ground running. Meanwhile, proper lead nurturing gives your team a solid long-game source for stronger, more sustainable success.
In this article, we’ll explore the factors that most impact your lead generation timeline, how you can accelerate results, and the common pitfalls to avoid. With this knowledge, you'll be equipped to build a realistic, successful plan for turning leads into revenue.
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Factors Affecting Your Lead Generation Results
Do you want to accelerate results or optimize for long-term success? Regardless of your intentions, certain elements play a crucial role in how quickly you see those leads turn into paying customers. When you recognize how these variables affect your outcomes, you can make informed decisions to elevate the effectiveness of your campaign.
Brand Recognition: Build on Your Existing Presence
Brand recognition is essential for lead generation because it establishes trust and familiarity, which accelerates the sales process. Here are a few ways stronger brand recognition leads to faster results:
Faster Conversions
When potential customers already recognize your brand, they’re more likely to engage and trust your message. This familiarity shortens the time needed to nurture leads, speeding up conversions.
Building Credibility
A well-known brand is seen as more credible, making prospects more comfortable reaching out or responding to outreach. Without the need to prove your legitimacy, your lead generation efforts can focus on meeting customer needs.
Lower Cost Per Lead
Established brands often experience a lower cost per lead because their recognition drives organic traffic and inbound leads. These leads tend to be more qualified, increasing the success of your outreach campaigns.
Competitive Advantage
Strong brand recognition sets you apart from competitors, making it easier to win over leads who are in the decision-making phase.
If your brand is less established, partnering with a growth marketing expert can help boost your credibility and quickly get your ideal customers thinking about your brand.
Average Sales Cycle: Understanding and Adjusting Expectations
Understanding your average sales cycle helps set realistic expectations for when you’ll start seeing results from a lead generation campaign. If your typical sales cycle is six months, then you will want to adjust your timeline accordingly to prevent frustration.
Inbound Leads Vs. Outbound Lead Generation
Other factors affecting when you can expect to see results include the type of campaigns you are running, and the quality of the leads you are starting with. If your lead generation campaign involves contacting warm prospects—referrals, people who have downloaded gated assets from your website or reached out, etc.—then your lead generation results will come faster. Starting with cold calling or contacts who have never engaged with your brand will take more nurturing.
Customer Retention Campaigns as a Revenue Generator
Customer reengagement campaigns usually generate faster results, and they serve as an excellent complement to any new business campaign you are starting. Contacting customers who have been inactive for a while, and those who may not be aware of product or service upgrades offers a low-hanging fruit for additional revenue. Additionally, it helps improve customer relationships and build brand loyalty.
The fastest conversions come with campaigns built on warm leads and existing customers. These will get you quick revenue and speedy results while you work on your long-term growth. Keeping all these factors in mind will help you set attainable goals and optimize campaigns for better results.
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Pitfalls to Avoid When Generating Leads for Fast Results
Building your campaign on the foundation of a solid value proposition and a clearly-defined target audience is just the beginning of a successful campaign that delivers fast results. After your campaign is up and running, you’ll want to avoid these common pitfalls in order to keep a constant flow of leads running through your sales pipeline.
Prioritizing Quantity Over Quality
Focusing on gathering a large volume of leads quickly may result in low-quality prospects that aren’t likely to convert, wasting time and resources, and extending the amount of time it takes to see results.
Solution: Work with your lead generation partner to ensure your scoring system is effective, and your leads are properly qualified before the handoff. This gives your sales team a greater number of wins with leads that have a genuine interest in your products and services.
Ignoring Lead Nurturing
Rushing leads without building relationships reduces the chance of closing deals and makes your brand seem pushy. It takes time to build trust and rapport with your prospects, and hurrying things along for the sake of revenue is not a good look for your brand.
Solution: Take advantage of every sales opportunity by fully nurturing your leads every step of the way through the funnel. Make sure they have the resources they need to make a decision, and help them get to know your brand with regular, well-timed touchpoints.
Over-Relying on Cold Outreach
Relying too heavily on cold leads, like cold calls or emails, can slow down results and waste resources. Warmer leads from inbound strategies tend to convert faster.
Solution: When building your list of prospects, make sure you include contacts who have reached out with questions, downloaded assets from your website, talked to you at trade shows, or engaged in any other way with your brand.
Unclear Targeting
Failing to define and focus on a specific audience wastes time and resources on prospects who aren't a good fit for your product or service.
Solution: One way to ensure you are targeting the right people is to work with your lead generation partner to build an ideal customer profile. As your campaign progresses, evaluate key metrics like conversion rate, lead quality, engagement, and sales cycle length to determine whether you are talking to the right people or not.
Neglecting Long-Term Strategy
Focusing solely on quick wins can hurt long-term success. Although your lead generation partner will work with you to make an early impact, you want sustainable growth for your team.
Solution: Spend the time upfront to be sure everyone is aligned with long-term corporate objectives. Any insight about future plans can influence the information captured or extracted from potential customers and be invaluable in the future.
Underestimating the Sales Cycle
Expecting immediate conversions without considering your industry’s typical sales cycle can lead to unrealistic goals and frustration.
Solution: Make sure you account for your sales cycle when planning for resources to align your budget and strategy with the buying journey, and don’t abandon your nurturing process.
Sound Strategy and Realistic Expectations for Better Results
It’s vital to the success of your business to set attainable sales goals and build realistic plans for efficient use of your resources. The decision makers and stakeholders at your business want to see that you’ve facilitated rapid ROI and met short-term revenue goals. Bringing these two ideals together may seem like trying to fill in the Grand Canyon, but well-planned lead generation campaigns can satisfy your sales team and your stakeholders.
Empower your sales team with a solid foundation and careful attention to strategy for greater success now and in the long run. Optimize your campaigns for speed by re-engaging existing customers, and build a pipeline that consistently delivers by focusing on building relationships and nurturing your leads the entire way down the funnel.
Develop a deep understanding of your business’s unique factors—such as brand recognition, sales cycle, and audience targeting—and keep evaluating your most important metrics to sustain your growth. When you establish realistic expectations and optimize your lead gen strategy, your sales team will experience faster wins, your stakeholders will see real progress, and your company will be positioned for long-term success.
Generating Leads With Better Results
Picture working with a lead generation partner that leverages 30 years of experience applying proven metrics, processes, and strategies to drive success. With Incept, that’s exactly what you get. We help you amplify your lead generation campaigns and win the revenue you need right now, while staying aligned with your long-term goals.
Our approach is built on realistic expectations, and we offer a full spectrum of tailored, fractional services to provide the expertise and flexibility you need. Whether your business is scaling up or down to meet demand, Incept is there to help. Over the past 30 years, the interactions we have had on behalf of our clients have directly led to billions in transactions, and our lead generation services generate leads that contribute to $1+ million contracts each month.
Here’s what one client had to say about working with us:
“Working with Incept has supercharged our lead generation efforts! They have been able to use their systematic approach to consistently deliver high-quality leads for our sales people. They have an uncanny ability to get in touch with key decision-makers and discover critical pieces of information. I look forward to seeing how our sales will continue to grow as a result of their efforts.”