In short, I strongly believe that B2B lead generation is not just a numbers game, but I don’t know how many people believe me.
I was reading the excellent 2013 B2B Lead Generation Trends by Holger Schulze http://www.slideshare.net/hschulze/b2-b-lead-generation-report-2013 and there were a few statistics that surprised me.
Over 60% of recipients said their biggest challenge for 2013 was to generate high quality sales leads. This in itself isn’t that surprising, though I did think it might be higher. However the statistics I did find quite surprising were:
60% measure the cost per lead
50% measure lead volume
40% measure the closing rate
35% measure the cost per customer acquired
To me this seems completely the wrong way round. When I measure our own lead generation activity, my first metric when judging whether to continue a campaign/medium is cost per new sale. Then I look at the closing rate, then lead volume and finally cost per lead.
Initially I thought that these statistics were at odds with the biggest challenges. But then thinking about it they kind of go together. If the majority of companies aren’t measuring the success or quality of leads only the number they get, then I can certainly imagine people just wanting to get more quality leads.
However for me our biggest challenge is the time/budget/resource to do more of what I know works.
Generating leads is very easy. I can pay for Twitter followers and Facebook likes, buy leads on a pay-per-lead basis, that are being sold by all my competitors, pick up business cards at trade shows, etc. etc. All of these will generate lots of leads and will be very cheap. And if companies aren’t measuring the success of these, only how much they cost and how many they generate, how will they know whether to continue with them.
Generating high quality leads is very difficult and can’t just be measured in how much they cost and the number that are generated. It takes a lot more analysis, but the effort has a massive return as you will only focus on doing more of the activity that you know generate sales not just leads.
To me there is only one reason to undertake lead generation, to generate sales opportunities that turn into sales to grow the company.
That is why we as a business focus on quality and ROI not quantity.
