4 out of 5 un-worked leads ultimately buy something - are you letting your leads slip away?

B2B companies - in fact, many of these marketers would still say it's their top priority 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, and spend more time nurturing existing contacts than acquiring new ones. This article provides an overview on how B2B marketers can build the foundation for their own lead nurturing program. A brief history of lead generation. Ten years ago, standard operating procedure for most B2B marketers was to generate as many leads as possible, regardless of quality. They were further encouraged by the advent of email marketing, which enabled them to reach thousands (if not millions) of potential buyers relatively inexpensively. Giveaways were also common - tee-shirt vendors made a fortune in the late 90s. Those tactics were effective in that they resulted in high quantities of leads. But few seemed to notice that all this acquisition was expensive - list rentals, giveaways and fulfillment ate up huge chunks of budget. And though impressive quarterly marketing review charts showed lead counts moving up and to the right, the quality of these leads was highly suspect. As a result, response rates for house lists soon plummeted as would-be buyers tuned out increasingly irrelevant pitches. Another byproduct was that marketing departments developed a bad reputation among salespeople for generating poor-quality leads. Overall it was a highly inefficient model - leads that were expensive to generate were also poor quality. Everyone loses. Circa 2001 - after the dot-com bubble burst - the trend started moving towards 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 giveaways were harder to come by. In terms of cost, this strategy was a wash. Per-lead costs went up, but overall costs came down due to lower volumes. On the plus side, the leads turned over to sales tended to be better qualified than in the previous era - more leads converted into real opportunities. But a high number of leads, rejected by sales as unqualified, still earned the dreaded "assigned to marketing" label and were returned to the pile to languish while the hot new leads got all the attention.