What are some of the top reasons your buyers are ignoring your lead-gen efforts?

One of the main reasons is that too many lead-gen marketers force people to go directly from "Here's some content, please give us your email" to "BOOM. Sales is calling you!" Folks may be interested in downloading the high-level content but may not be interested in you as a company or brand—yet.

Unfortunately, many marketers have a complete lack of understanding of demand gen vs. lead gen. They need to know that if you haven't generated demand along the journey, you can't expect people to know that they are jumping right into a solution-focused conversation (and that they need to be comfortable with that).

Lead gen gets you a mass number of contacts to nurture, but many marketers lack the skills, processes, and technology to nurture those leads, so they get turned over to the sales team too early.

What ends up happening is that target prospects become leery of those lead-gen efforts because prospects see the efforts as setting them up for sales overload. Before target prospects take you up on your lead-gen bait, they have to consider, "Is this content or conversation or event worth an ongoing time commitment with a sales rep that I'm not ready for?"

Among the myriad reasons buyers are ignoring your lead-gen efforts are...

• Buyers' inboxes are inundated with emails.
• Their brains are saturated by the marketing messages everywhere.
• They lack the time to process all the content being offered.