A Solution to Poor IT and HR Lead Quality

B-to-B marketing executives increasingly rely on whitepaper and download-based lead generation as a primary input to their company's sales processes. In cases of complex sales cycles, lead gen has proven to be a useful tool in providing qualified, interested prospects for internal sales teams to manage through to close. Typically, this strategy is manifested as a whitepaper, written and presented so as to discern a prospect's interest in the solution to a particular business problem. If your internal sales person can say, "If someone is reading this paper, I want to talk to him about our product." you generally have the makings of a successful whitepaper lead-gen campaign. For companies in the software space, trial downloads provide an equivalent vetting device for leads. One can assume that if a person takes the time to download and install your software then he is a good prospect to eventually buy it. The success and popularity of B-to-B lead-gen has lead to a commoditization of the medium. Almost every online publication, portal and enthusiast site, now offers to host whitepaper campaigns. Many of these sites offer whitepapers aggregated from other sources and sites. Often, marketing execs are unaware of where their whitepapers are placed and, therefore, the source of resulting leads. Even within the same family of websites, one can find the whitepapers presented in various formats and in locations that have little relevance to the content. This is a result of a shotgun approach where publishers and aggregators simply try to get the offer in front of as many eyeballs as possible relying on some unknown rate of interest to produce valid registrations. If they need to produce more leads for the customer, they expand the circulation of the offer to an increasingly wider and less relevant audience. Leads produced from the sum of these activities are bundled together and returned to the customer in batches. Marketing execs then give the leads to their sales teams and track the time and rate of close. However, since the variations in lead origins are unknown, all the marketer can track are aggregate rates of performance. Despite extreme deviations in quality between lead sources and even within lead batches, the commoditization of the medium means all leads are treated and priced equally.