Quality of Sales Leads vs. Volume!

Some Heads of Sales & Marketing make the mistake of setting targets for their Telemarketing resources (both internal or external), on purely the number of leads generated.

It is interesting to note that Marketing Sherpa’s 2012 B2B Benchmark report uncovered that “73% of the leads distributed to sales ARE NOT Sales-Ready!” and thus many of the appointments set by ‘quantity’ based campaigns turn into wasted sales time.

Moreover, in the same report; a case of a company that transitioned to higher quality “sales-ready” scored leads was referenced and it was revealed that they experienced the following:

· Lead volume dropped by 52%

· Revenues increased 41%

The message is clear

Campaigns that focus on delivering quality appointments that waste less sales time but have the potential of significantly increasing overall business revenues. However, generating quality ‘sales-ready’ leads isn’t easy

In fact, in research by Laurie Beasley – President Beasley Direct Marketing and Tom Judge – VP Strategy Direct Marketing Partners (DMP) presented at the DMA Worldwide Conference in 2013, it was revealed that it can take between 7 -13+ touches to generate a qualified B2B sales lead.

These touches could include some of the following marketing and telesales activities:

· Email campaign

· Direct email

· Approach through LinkedIn

· Calls

· Advertising

· Events

· Webinars

· Pay-per-click advertising

The importance of lead nurturing

Marketing are under increasing pressure to deliver and thus often pass leads over to sales before they are sales ready, when they should really cultivated until they are ready to engage with sales. When leads are prematurely passed – sales often then “cherry pick” they deem ready causing lead leakage – which can result in tension between the sales and marketing team.

One thing is clear – in order to generate a steady flow of qualified leads you need to invest in an integrated and structured lead generation and pipeline nurturing programme with multiple touch points.