Brian Carroll is Executive Director of Revenue Optimization for MECLABS and spoke midday here in Orlando on Day Two of the MarketingSherpa 2012 B2B Summit. Some key takeaways all organizations should think about are:
- 64% of leads generated go directly to field sales without filtering or prequalification
- Nurturing leads increases revenue by 125%—yet most companies don’t do it
- 80% of marketing generated leads are ignored, lost or ineffectively followed up by field sales (66% of sales people stop trying after as few as three attempts)
With a combination of developing a universal lead definition, nurturing prospects until they are sales ready and aligning the marketing and sales teams around effective processes, companies can enjoy the following results:
- 375% increase in sales ready leads
- 200% increase in leads converting to opportunities
- In one case $4.9 million in incremental sales and an additional $15 million in pipeline (company was $80 million total revenue)
- All this without incremental marketing cost
Brian and I don’t entirely agree on the use of BANT as the basis for a universal lead definition. Other members of the audience agreed with me that waiting for budget and timeframe can mean waiting until the deal is already baked by a competitor. The point, though, was to work with sales in the direction of a common definition of a lead and make adjustments as necessary. In other words, if sales does not agree on the lead definition (right or wrong), there is no chance they are going to follow-up on the leads generated.
A crowd of over 200 enjoyed the day as did we.
Signing off now from the 2012 MarketingSherpa B2B Summit
