Many B2B businesses pour time, money, and resources into lead generation without stopping to ask the uncomfortable question: Is any of this actually working?
The truth is that most lead generation strategies don’t fail overnight. They deteriorate gradually, with warning signs appearing months before the crisis becomes obvious.
The good news is that these problems are fixable – but only if you catch them early enough. Here are ten warning signs that your lead generation strategy desperately needs an audit.
1. Your Sales Team Complains About Lead Quality
When your sales team consistently pushes back on the leads they’re receiving, claiming they’re “not qualified” or “not ready to buy,” that’s not just sales making excuses – it’s a fundamental breakdown in your lead generation process.
This disconnect usually means one of three things is happening:
- Your marketing team and sales team have different definitions of what constitutes a qualified lead.
- Your lead qualification criteria is too loose or non-existent.
- You’re generating volume for the sake of hitting targets rather than quality that converts.
Without clear qualification criteria that both teams agree on, you’ll continue generating leads that waste everyone’s time.
The fix: Bring sales and marketing together to define qualification criteria everyone accepts. What budget indicators matter? Which job titles should you target? What behaviours signal genuine interest versus casual browsing?
2. Your Conversion Rates Are Falling
Perhaps the clearest warning sign that something’s wrong is declining conversion rates at any stage of your funnel.
Many businesses make the mistake of trying to solve falling conversion rates by increasing volume. They think that if they just generate more leads at the top of the funnel, they’ll hit their targets despite lower conversion percentages.
This approach burns through budget whilst making your fundamental problems worse.
The fix: Track conversion rates at every stage of your funnel and identify where prospects are dropping off. Is it during initial qualification? At the demo stage? During contract negotiation? Each bottleneck requires a different solution.
Learn more: How To Calculate Your Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate.
3. Your Cost Per Lead Keeps Increasing
If you’re spending more money to generate each lead whilst getting worse results, that’s a death spiral that will eventually destroy your ROI.
Rising cost per lead often indicates that:
- Your targeting has become too broad
- Your messaging has lost relevance
- Competition in your channels has increased
- Your data quality has deteriorated.
The fix: Audit your channel performance individually. Which sources deliver the best quality leads at the lowest cost? Double down on what works and ruthlessly cut what doesn’t. Sometimes doing less generates better results than doing more.
4. You’re Getting Plenty of Leads But No Revenue
High lead volume with low revenue is perhaps the most frustrating situation – it looks like everything’s working, until you realise none of it converts into actual business.
This mismatch usually means your lead generation is targeting the wrong audience entirely, or your qualification process lets through prospects who will never buy.
There might also be a massive gap between what marketing promises and what sales delivers, or your sales process can’t handle the type of leads being generated.
At The Lead Generation Company, our clients convert up to 80% of the leads we generate because we focus obsessively on qualification before passing anyone to sales teams. Volume without quality is just noise.
The fix: Follow a sample of leads through your entire process from first contact to closed-lost. Where do they drop out? Why? What did they say? The answers will reveal whether you’re targeting the right people in the first place.
5. Your Data Quality Is Questionable
When your sales team regularly encounters wrong phone numbers, outdated email addresses, people who’ve changed jobs, or contacts at companies that don’t match your ICP, your data quality has become a serious problem.
Poor data quality doesn’t just waste time on individual bad calls – it skews your entire understanding of what’s working. You can’t accurately measure campaign performance when 30% of your data is wrong.
The fix: Invest in data quality. Look for providers offering 95%+ accuracy guarantees with recent verification. We guarantee 98% accuracy on B2B data because we understand this is non-negotiable for effective lead generation.
6. You’re Relying on a Single Channel
If all your leads come from one source – whether that’s paid search, email, LinkedIn, or any other single channel – you’re one algorithm change or platform policy update away from disaster.
Single-channel strategies also miss prospects who simply don’t engage through that particular method. Some decision makers ignore emails but take phone calls. Others engage on LinkedIn but never respond to cold outreach.
The fix: Build an integrated multi-channel approach. This creates multiple opportunities for prospects to engage when and how they prefer.
7. You Can’t Explain What’s Working and Why
If someone asked you right now which campaigns, channels, messages, or offers generate your best leads, could you answer with confidence backed by data?
Many businesses run lead generation as a black box. Money goes in one end, some leads come out the other, but nobody really understands the mechanics of what’s working and what isn’t.
The fix: Implement proper attribution and tracking. Every lead should be traceable back to its source, campaign, message, and offer. Your CRM should tell you not just where leads came from, but which sources convert best into actual customers.
8. Your Sales Cycle Keeps Getting Longer
When deals that used to close in 30 days now take 90 days, and what used to take 90 days now takes six months, something fundamental has shifted.
Lengthening sales cycles often indicates:
- You’re targeting prospects who aren’t ready to buy
- Your value proposition has become less compelling relative to alternatives
- You’re not reaching decision makers early enough
- Your competitors have become more aggressive.
Whatever the cause, longer sales cycles mean slower revenue growth, higher customer acquisition costs, and more deals that eventually die rather than close.
The fix: Examine where time gets lost in your sales process. Is it during initial discovery? Waiting for stakeholder approval? Procurement reviews? Understanding where delays happen reveals what needs to change in your qualification and targeting.
Learn more about: The Lead Nurturing Lifecycle.
9. Your Marketing and Sales Teams Don’t Trust Each Other
The classic scenario: marketing claims they’re delivering great leads that sales isn’t following up properly, whilst sales insists marketing generates rubbish that wastes their time.
This trust breakdown is both a symptom and a cause of lead generation failure. It indicates misaligned definitions of quality, no agreement on qualification criteria, poor communication between teams, and no shared accountability for results.
The fix: Create a formal service level agreement (SLA) between marketing and sales. Define lead qualification criteria together, establish response time commitments, agree on how feedback flows between teams, and create shared metrics that both teams own jointly.
10. You’re Not Sure What to Do Next
Perhaps the clearest sign you need an audit is simply feeling lost. You know something isn’t working, but you can’t pinpoint what. You’ve tried various tactics, but nothing has consistently moved the needle.
This confusion typically means you lack clear visibility into your funnel performance, you’re making changes without understanding why previous approaches failed, you don’t have baseline metrics to measure improvement against, or you need outside expertise to identify blind spots.
The fix: Conduct a comprehensive audit with fresh eyes. Sometimes an external perspective reveals problems that internal teams are too close to see.
Ready To Audit Your Lead Generation Strategy?
If you recognise three or more of these warning signs in your own business, you need an audit sooner rather than later. The longer you wait, the more budget you’ll waste, and the further behind your competitors you’ll fall.
The Lead Generation Company has spent over a decade helping businesses transform their lead generation results through integrated multi-channel approaches that actually work. Get in touch for an honest conversation about your challenges and what needs to change.