In tight economic times, it’s often tempting for Marketing to step up its lead-generating efforts in an attempt to help the company and demonstrate its own value …too often in the process inundating Sales with low-quality leads that are never acted upon. Another knee-jerk reaction is to focus on driving down cost-per-lead (again demonstrating to top management how it’s helping the company tighten its belt), while most likely driving down average lead quality in the process.
Both of these temptations should be avoided, posts Brian Carroll on his B2B LeadGen Blog. In fact, Marketing and Sales need to collaborate and actually define what makes a good sales lead in your business. Clearly, you’re better off with 10 quality leads out of a group of 20 responses than you are with 5 in a group of 50; and the metric you really need is not the cost to get the 20 or 50, but the cost per each of the 5 or 10 leads that will be pursued …i.e., the cost-per-opportunity, or cost-per-lead-pursued by Sales.
Brian gives some good pointers for how to arrive at a working definition of a good sales lead in this post, and promises more to come; we’ll stay tuned.
