Dear CEO: Find out how well your team is nurturing its B2B sales leads

Posted by Dan McDade

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on Oct 6, 2017 11:22:47 AM

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Standard B2B lead-generation programs produce an average 5% lead rate while advanced lead-generation programs (which include lead nurturing) produce an average 15% lead rate—three times higher.

When you and your team are focused exclusively on “lead” outcomes, immediate costs are misleading and long-term costs increase dramatically. Here is why:

You have heard the expression that to a hammer everything looks like a nail. If you are buying leads on a pay for performance basis (which means the lead generator makes more money by generating more leads) then to the lead generator everything looks like a lead. That is why you frequently hear sales say: “the leads suck.”

If you are paying (just as an example) $750 per appointment, and on average 40% or more of those appointments are with someone who cannot or will not buy, then you are actually paying $1250 per appointment—if you consider, as PointClear does, that unless it’s a qualified prospect it doesn’t count.

Long term, things get even worse. Many marketing organizations (and some sales lead generation companies as well) do what I call “one-and-done “marketing. They buy a list, market to it, send the leads to sales and then start over again three-to-six months later.

In that case 1,000 more companies have to be culled through to find the next 50 leads.

What if instead, using the outcomes or dispositions listed under Advanced Lead Generation (table below), it was possible to generate another 104 leads by reaching out to just 700 companies, instead of 1,000? In an average situation, the cost per lead drops from $1250 to $841 per lead. The math isn’t real complex. By leveraging the work done in the first go-round you save a lot of money, a lot of time … and have more to show for your efforts.

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Email me if you want to go through the calculation: dan.mcdade@pointclear.com

Regarding cost per lead, you can learn more by visiting this blog. In it I state: “How much should a lead cost? Probably more than you think but less than you are currently paying.”

Go to this blog to learn more about nurturing. In that blog, I write: “The bottom line is that you should be speaking to prospects from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel. Prospects will move up and down in the funnel. And, there are no silver bullets regarding content that should be consumed by prospects at various stages in the sales cycle—every prospect and situation is different.

“Hence the growing popularity of Account-Based Marketing—the marketing approach that treats each account uniquely, addressing specific needs with specific information in a consultative way to help prospects progress toward the right solution for them.”

Dear CEO: how out how much money is your team is leaving on the table due to ineffective or non-existent nurturing? Lead qualification services and lead nurturing services can help—ask me how.


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Topics: B2B Sales, Lead Nurturing


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