According to a leading analyst firm, 4 out of 5 un-worked leads ultimately buy something. Are your leads slipping away because they are disqualified too early in the sales cycle? Download this new white paper to learn how B2B marketing leaders are adopting effective approaches to nurture qualified leads - from prospect to sale.
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OCTOBER 2009Executive SummaryTraditionally, lead generation has been a central focus of marketers at mid-sizedB2B companies - in fact, many of these marketers would still say it's their toppriority because their pay and bonus are tied to it. However a shift is occurring,as more and more companies turn their focus from quantity to quality, andspend more time nurturing existing contacts than acquiring new ones. Thisarticle provides an overview on how B2B marketers can build the foundationfor their own lead nurturing program."A marketing A brief history of lead generationfunction can Ten years ago, standard operating procedure for most B2B marketers was togenerate as many leads as possible, regardless of quality. They were furthergenerate a billion encouraged by the advent of email marketing, which enabled them to reachthousands (if not millions) of potential buyers relatively inexpensively.leads and fail if Giveaways were also common - tee-shirt vendors made a fortune in the late 90s.lead management Those tactics were effective in that they resulted in high quantities of leads.1 But few seemed to notice that all this acquisition was expensive - list rentals,is neglected." giveaways and fulfillment ate up huge chunks of budget.SiriusDecisions, 2009 And though impressive quarterly marketing review charts showed lead countsmoving up and to the right, the quality of these leads was highly suspect. Asa result, response rates for house lists soon plummeted as would-be buyerstuned out increasingly irrelevant pitches. Another byproduct was that marketingdepartments developed a bad reputation among salespeople for generatingpoor-quality leads.
Overall it was a highly inefficient model - leads that were expensive to generatewere also poor quality. Everyone loses.
Circa 2001 - after the dot-com bubble burst - the trend started movingtowards generating qualified leads, with an emphasis on quality over quantity.Marketers started to focus on conversion rates rather than just raw lead counts.Qualification questions - typically following the BANT model (Budget, Authority,Need and Timeline) - became standard on registration forms, and giveawayswere harder to come by.
In terms of cost, this strategy was a wash. Per-lead costs went up, but overallcosts came down due to lower volumes. On the plus side, the leads turned overto sales tended to be better qualified than in the previous era - more leadsconverted into real opportunities. But a high number of leads, rejected by salesas unqualified, still earned the dreaded "assigned to marketing" label and werereturned to the pile to languish while the hot new leads got all the attention.
2 OCTOBER 2009HighBegin focus on Highlead nurturing Leyt vil ea lu ofQ"Scoring leads Md aa te uLaccurately and rityBegin focus onnurturing demand qualificationIndiscriminateblasting[helps] marketers LowLowhand only truly 200020022009qualified leads over Now, forward-thinking marketers are applying lead nurturing techniques -to sales and helps the process of moving existing contacts towards readiness to buy. The premisebehind lead nurturing is that not all contacts will be immediately ready to buyshorten the overall your company's products - some will need some time to ripen. Nurturingcampaigns help maintain their interest during this period, and hopefully help2sales process." them ripen more quickly.
4 out of 5 un-worked leads ultimately buy somethingAccording to the research firm SiriusDecisions, 4 out of 5 un-worked leadsultimately buy something. Often, these leads are un-worked because they weredisqualified early in the process. There are multiple reasons for that, many ofthem good. Maybe the project didn't yet have approved budget, or their needwasn't yet acute or defined, or the project was postponed. But still, it would painmost marketing and sales people to think that 4 out of 5 un-worked leads hadthe potential to become customers - and didn't.
Lead nurturing campaigns can eliminate that waste. Designed to help matchcontent and offers to each contact's stage in the sales cycle, lead nurturingcampaigns are highly targeted. Think of a trolley tour, where tourists can getoff at any stop to explore and then get back on when they're ready. The tourguides have a script for each leg of the tour - they don't start from the verybeginning at every single stop, forcing ... [download for more]
