What’s Your Goal? More Leads or Better Leads? (Silverpop)
” In the latest study from Forrester Research, “Rethinking the B2B Tech Marketing Mix in the Digital Age,” more than 50 percent of marketers surveyed said generating more leads was their top challenge. That’s not at all surprising when you consider that gathering leads is the primary focus of most B2B marketing programs, but it’s important not to sacrifice quality for quantity. Unless you develop a process for managing leads, you’ll find it difficult to impact revenues.The first step to managing leads effectively is to analyze where they come from, what it takes to keep them interested and what additional information you need to give them to make the sale. Those kinds of critical insights are what puts a lead-management program a level or two above the rest and will be more likely to drive revenue results that will please you and your CEO.
Pushing leads into the top of the sales pipeline and then just letting them sit there is not going to get the results you’re seeking. Carlos Hidalgo, president of The Annuitas Group, noted: “I remember one client who told us that the 300-plus leads we had generated over a six-week period were no good. We implemented a ‘post campaign’ research project and identified that more than half of the leads never received any kind of follow-up. Of those, 90 percent ended up buying from our client’s competitors within a 90-day period. It’s hard to argue with statistics.”
The point is, you can drag all the suspects in the world into your pipeline, but unless you take the time to weed through them in a systematic manner and identify the hot ones from the cold, you’re only wasting your time, your marketing budget and the efforts of your sales team to track down opportunities.”
