Once upon a time, say back in the 90s and the early 2000s, lead generation was widely considered to be the responsibility of the sales team. Not so now.
According to business-to-business & technology marketing studies, sales people can typically find about 40% of the new business opportunities needed to meet their companies’ revenue goals. The rest come from marketing.
If marketing is expected to account for 60% of your leads, are you paying enough attention to this function?
The process of lead generation offers various opportunities for optimization, which is good news if you are measuring and monitoring your program correctly. It means you have multiple levers to pull and dials to turn to increase the number and quality of leads.
At the front end of your lead generation process, you can optimize the tactics you use to attract prospects into your marketing system. These are tactics such as online and offline advertising, direct mail, trade shows, and even PR. The most important metric at this point is conversion rate – what percentage of prospects exposed to your message take the action you want them to take to enter your marketing system?
In the middle of the lead generation process are lead qualification and nurturing activities that can be optimized. Many tech leaders find they can increase effectiveness of their sales team by refining the definition of a qualified lead and the point at which prospects are passed from marketing to sales. Monitor the number of leads that are made ready for sales.
Lead nurturing programs – such as email, telemarketing and events – can also be modified to ensure that the highest number of prospects move through the system as quickly as possible. Measuring attendance at webinars, tele-seminars and special events is important; but you can also achieve greater success by watching the number of prospects at each point in the process, the number that fall out of the system – or fail to progress any further, and the speed at which they move through your nurturing system to become sales ready.
Finally, the marketing-to-sales handoff often offers another opportunity to improve results. If you’ve tweaked your definition of a qualified lead and you have agreement from both sales and marketing on this definition, you should have few non-qualified leads being passed on to the sales team. But even the most qualified leads can sometimes become unqualified. What happens to them? You can increase lead generation effectiveness by providing a smooth process for returning non-qualified leads to marketing.
Although it isn’t technically part of the lead generation process, an additional opportunity for improvement lies in how quickly and how effectively the sales team jumps on the qualified leads. Hot leads tend to cool off very quickly. As your marketing becomes more productive and the number of leads goes up, you will need to know the right time at which to add to the sales force. That’s a high-class problem.
So, is your marketing effort producing its 60% of leads. How are you measuring it? Share your answers with the rest of us.
Technorati Tags: lead generation, demand generation, lead nurturing, measuring marketing
This article was first published November 14, 2007 on the Tatum Marketing blog
Once upon a time, say back in the 90s and the early 2000s, lead generation was widely considered to be the responsibility of the sales team. Not so now.
According to business-to-business & technology marketing studies, sales people can typically find about 40% of the new business opportunities needed to meet their companies’ revenue goals. The rest come from marketing.
If marketing is expected to account for 60% of your leads, are you paying enough attention to this function?
The process of lead generation offers various opportunities for optimization, which is good news if you are measuring and monitoring your program correctly. It means you have multiple levers to pull and dials to turn to increase the number and quality of leads.
At the front end of your lead generation process, you can optimize the tactics you use to attract prospects into your marketing system. These are tactics such as online and offline advertising, direct mail, trade shows, and even PR. The most important metric at this point is conversion rate – what percentage of prospects exposed to your message take the action you want them to take to enter your marketing system?
In the middle of the lead generation process are lead qualification and nurturing activities that can be optimized. Many tech leaders find they can increase effectiveness of their sales team by refining the definition of a qualified lead and the point at which prospects are passed from marketing to sales. Monitor the number of leads that are made ready for sales.
Lead nurturing programs – such as email, telemarketing and events – can also be modified to ensure that the highest number of prospects move through the system as quickly as possible. Measuring attendance at webinars, tele-seminars and special events is important; but you can also achieve greater success by watching the number of prospects at each point in the process, the number that fall out of the system – or fail to progress any further, and the speed at which they move through your nurturing system to become sales ready.
Finally, the marketing-to-sales handoff often offers another opportunity to improve results. If you’ve tweaked your definition of a qualified lead and you have agreement from both sales and marketing on this definition, you should have few non-qualified leads being passed on to the sales team. But even the most qualified leads can sometimes become unqualified. What happens to them? You can increase lead generation effectiveness by providing a smooth process for returning non-qualified leads to marketing.
Although it isn’t technically part of the lead generation process, an additional opportunity for improvement lies in how quickly and how effectively the sales team jumps on the qualified leads. Hot leads tend to cool off very quickly. As your marketing becomes more productive and the number of leads goes up, you will need to know the right time at which to add to the sales force. That’s a high-class problem.
So, is your marketing effort producing its 60% of leads. How are you measuring it? Share your answers with the rest of us.
Tue, Nov 3, 2009
Strategy, Traffic
Written by: Susan Tatum