If you have gone through spring cleaning of your lead generation, then you should also be thinking about how well you are handling your lead nurturing or lead management. Lead Liaison produced an infographic recently to highlight the consequences of poor lead management.
Did you know:
- 78% of B2B buyers start their research for products online (in my view we all know this but we have still not been able to conclusively indicate where B2B buyers are – some studies say Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and more)
- 13% who respond to lead generation campaigns are actually ready to buy
- 80% of marketers do not pass leads to sales (I wonder what definition of a lead they are using for this metric?)
- 70% of leads generated will never be followed up
- Leads convert 22 times more often when you make contact in 5 minutes (this may explain Optify’s report that the most leads come from Twitter)
- Businesses that contact leads within the first hour have nearly 7 times greater chance of qualifying the lead
- The average lead takes between 5 and 6 attempts to contact
- 73% of sales teams do not have a process to re-qualify or re-visit leads
- up to 70% of initially disqualified leads become qualified within 12 months if nurtured
- 45% of businesses do not have standardized sales and marketing processes
So what happens if you ignore or conduct your lead management poorly? Lead Liaison provides several different ways businesses fail in this area and their consequences. For example, if you have poor lead distribution, this can lead to a lack of confidence that leads will actually be distributed, productivity diminishes, your sales team gets frustrated and your overall costs rise. I would add that in addition, sales diminish and revenue declines. Another scenario is if you fail to follow up on your prospects. This can result in the prospect losing confidence in your company, the prospect goes to another company, your competitor wins the business and you lose market share and revenue.
If there is no nurturing of prospects and leads, a number of unwanted consequences will result:
- Prospects fail to keep your business as top of mind, the prospects forget about you, you do not get the sale and revenue decreases; OR
- The sales team loses touch with prospects, this enables your competitors to more easily make contact and develop a relationship with your prospect, it can lengthen the sales cycle, increases the time spent on these prospects, less focus on new business, revenue diminishes and company does not grow
- Another direction predicts you will develop a competitive vs. single source situation which leads to price erosion, your deals become smaller, you then need to get more business to meet your revenue goals which requires more resources to get more prospects and leads and drives up the costs
These are only a few of the scenarios set out below.
