In marketing, a lead is a potential buyer who has been qualified as showing some level of interest in purchasing your product or solution. Lead generation is the process of stimulating and capturing that interest for the direct purpose of developing the sales pipeline.
Lead generation uses various channels of digital marketing, which has changed a lot over the year. Especially now that there is an abundance of information readily available online, more “self-directed buyers” are emerging. According to Forrester, these buyers are often 65-90% through their buying journey before they even reach the vendor or talk to sales.
Quality Plus Quantity
The buying process has changed, and with the blast of emails and advertising, more focus is needed to build relationships with potential customers. This means your marketing department must employ new techniques to qualify potential leads before passing them to sales. Marketing must also assume the role of trusted advisor for both prospects and customers by creating valuable content and thought leadership assets.
Lead quality is a top priority, but it’s also a significant challenge. According to recent report from IDG, 61% of marketers say generating high quality leads was problematic for their organization, with the greatest barriers listed as a lack of resources in staffing, budgeting and time. That same survey reported company websites and email marketing among the most effective lead generation tactics used today.
Lead Generation Metrics
Content should be the foundation of your inbound marketing efforts. We can’t stress that enough. You need valuable, engaging, informative, sharable content to attract and acquire profitable customers in your target audience. And in addition to promotional content, you need thought leadership content as well, plus visual content and content specific for your social channels.
But you also need data and numbers to back up your hard work. When it comes to lead generation, it’s important to create intentional measurement strategies well in advance. Think about what, when and how you will measure each metric. Also, marketing needs to closely align with both sales and the C-suite to get on the same page and agree on the number of leads needed and the budget necessary to get them.
Here are some basic lead generation metrics many companies track as part of their lead generation efforts:
- Average sales price
- Conversion from Inquiry to Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
- Conversion from MQL to Sales Accepted Lead
- Cost per inquiry
- Cost per lead
- Marketing driven revenue (not counting cross-sales or up-sales)
- Monthly revenue target (sales goal)
- Number of marketing-driven deals
- Percentage of marketing’s contribution to closed/won revenue
- Percentage of marketing’s contribution to sales pipeline
- Qualified lead-to-opportunity ratio
- Inquiry-to-qualified-lead ratio
- Opportunity-to-sale ratio (percentage of pipeline opportunities closed by marketing)
- Quantity and Quality of Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
_____________________________________________
