Want a Bigger Marketing Budget? Send Less Leads to Sales
If your 2011 marketing budget is tighter than you want it to be, trying giving sales less leads.
According to Marketing Sherpa’s just-released 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, a whopping 80 percent of the 935 respondents said they pass unqualified leads along to sales. That’s a costly mistake.
Let me explain why:
For every 100 raw leads, only 4 to 7 are ready to buy. It’s no wonder that the 1,800 
companies surveyed as part of CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization Report said their sales teams spend 20 percent of their time generating leads. (And I’ve known of sales departments spending a lot more time than that.) In essence, they’re sorting through the raw leads that marketing sends them to get to that 4 to 7 percent who might actually buy.
What if marketing did a better job of qualifying leads before sending them to sales? In his webinar, Trends and Challenges of Lead Generation in 2011, Dave Green explained, in graphic detail, the impressive amount of profit that could result.
Think about it: What if you were able to reclaim 10 or 20 percent of your sales budget by increasing sales productivity? What if a mere percentage of that was diverted to your marketing budget to invest in better lead-qualification tools such as marketing automation, content strategy, lead nurturing, and telequalification? How much revenue could that potentially drive? How can you make a water-tight financial case to your CEO to prove that giving marketing more money will help significantly increase sales productivity and revenue capacity?
Get the answers by listening to the webinar replay.
Download the presentation slides
Lead Generation, Lead Management, Marketing Strategy, Sales, Sales Leads
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Fewer leads, not less leads.
#corrections
I think marketing is missing a huge opportunity to create real shareholder value. Too often we view the world from the perspective of lead generation and lead conversion. We forget that lead cultivation is a critical in between step. Marketing needs to take the lead (no pun intended) in cultivating leads and thereby increasing the number of opportunities for sales.
Well, yeah they really help you to acheive big target in lead marketing like giving you proper education about the leadership and if you have any problem then just follow it.
Great presentation… Shocking how low the average productivity is in sales.
A great way to qualify leads is to offer different content that is downloadable after filling out a form. This allows you to send leads to sells that have appropriately moved through the pipeline and are ready to buy based on information consumed.
Yeah the facts are really shocking. I thank the MarketingSherpa team for this initiative they have taken regarding the B2B Marketing Benchmark Report!The opinions may be of good use and benefit the B2B marketing fraternity as a whole.
Agreed Brian. The stats from Dave Green’s preso plus some others I have gathered over the years make a very compelling case for a greater focus on lead nurturing these days over simply generating more leads at the top of the funnel. The research shows that sales closes more deals for the same # of leads, cost of sales go down, marketing program ROI goes up – its a great argument to use in budget planning meetings with your CEO and CFO.
Henry Bruce
@hebruce
Marketing may not be in a position to qualify sales leads, other than the obvious ones such as a consumer lead when you only serve the business sector.
As many of us are small businesses with only one or two person marketing departments, if we are lucky to have a dedicated person at all, I vote in favor of marketing passing along any and every lead to sales to let them sort it out.
Awesome webinar and presentation. I can see why sales productivity is seen as low. Something that people in the industry need to be mindful of certainly!