B2B Marketers - Are Your Leads Sales-Ready?
Question for Marketers: From all of the demand generation you engage in, when you acquire a new lead, do you pass their information directly to sales/telemarketing for follow-up?
Do you know which of those leads sales follows-up on? Studies show that 79% of leads passed to sales are NEVER followed up on. Is there anything that marketing can do to ensure that leads are “more likely” to be sales ready before they get passed to Sales?
YES! B2B Marketers have options — it’s called lead nurturing. Marketing can utilize a content marketing strategy coupled with email marketing, and even telemarketing, to better qualify leads before they are passed to Sales. Companies that pursue these strategies are dramatically improving their close ratio, as well as lowering their cost-per-lead.
In the current economic times, it’s imperative that Marketers utilize strategies that provide the largest ROI on their marketing dollars. So how does a marketing organization that is already stretched for resources, implement a lead nurturing strategy that can improve the return on their marketing spend?
It is possible to implement, and will take ongoing content marketing efforts to be successful. The use of integrated marketing and lead management tools, like those available through Genoo’s lead management and nurturing capabilities, will free marketing from their reliance on their Information Technology department, and put them in control of the success of their lead nurturing program.
Critical to these tools is having a single view of your leads (no duplicates), with comprehensive tracking of how the lead responds to your marketing campaigns. Included and necessary is a way to segment your leads based on their activity and responses to those campaigns, so you can continue to target ever-relevant content of interest to them.
You will also need the ability to easily publish the content developed for your lead nurturing efforts, as well as capturing new lead information as new users find your material, and are interested in learning more. These pages are either extensions of your existing site, or is a new “microsite” that can be optimized for your target audience and keywords that you need in order to be found.
Given that the vast majority of users looking for a vendor start with an online search, getting found is critical to your lead generation activities — so you want tools you can utilize that put you in control of your website activities.
It may take a change to the activities you are currently pursuing to implement a lead nurturing program, but the rewards and return will pay dividends.
