As a B2B sales and marketing outsourcing company, we constantly keep up to date with the biggest trends and challenges B2B professionals are facing today. In terms of sales and marketing, we consistently see that the biggest challenge for B2B companies in 2013 is generating more B2B sales leads.
While wanting more leads is a rational approach to producing more revenue, we can’t help but wonder if there isn’t more to this story than meets the eye. From our perspective, it is not lead generation that derails most B2B companies, but rather lead nurturing and sales pipe development.
Here are some statistics to help explain our point of view:
- 5% of your market is ready to buy at any given time (Selling Power Magazine)
- 80% of leads are passed to sales before they are ready to engage (Marketing Sherpa)
- 70% of mishandled leads buy from a competitor (Forrester)
By looking at these statistics, you can see that might not be getting leads that is the problem. It is what you do with them once you have them. If 80% of your leads are being mishandled and 70% of mishandled leads buy from a competitor, it is no wonder you feel like you need more leads. You are essentially throwing more than half of the ones you have in the trash.
Rather than generating more B2B sales leads, what B2B companies need is to develop strategies for sales pipeline development and lead nurturing.
Many of the leads that come into your pipe are still figuring out the exact problem they have or are very early in their buying process. Asking these prospects if they would like a custom demo or free trial right away is likely to confuse or even annoy them. By sending out early-stage, non sales-y educational content, you can help guide these prospects through their own discovery and education, which is called lead nurturing. This way, when your lead decides it is time to buy, you are top of mind and have become a trusted industry resource.
This type of lead nurturing and sales pipeline management does not have to be expensive or complex. You simply need to map out your sales process and create marketing content to fit each stage of your buyers’ buying cycle, then push the content at the appropriate time (using your marketing automation solution), track engagement and finally, bring in the closer when buying signals have been shown.
If this seems complicated or overwhelming, here are several resources to help you get started:
- B2B Buying Cycles – Don’t Serve Dessert for Breakfast!
- Marketing Automation Implementation Checklist
- Core Competencies Required for Highly Qualified B2B Lead & Demand Generation
We help B2B companies with lead generation, lead database management and sales pipeline development & much more. If you would like to learn more about the services we offer, you can visit our services page.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
