As qualified prospects take charge of the process and become more elusive it may be time for marketers to revisit how to approach lead generation.

Many marketers struggle with developing and managing an ongoing lead generation program that improves lead quality and customer conversion. A study by The Lenskold Group and Pedowitz Group found that only 1 in 10 Marketing organization believe they are effective at lead generation. The State of Inbound study reported that 63% of respondents place generating leads as their top challenge followed by proving ROI. 

We have found that the success or lack of success for any opportunity and/or lead generation initiative rests in focusing on lead quality right from the start. Whenever possible, focus on targeted, multi-channel, carefully sequenced touches to improve Marketing ROI and the sales team’s productivity.

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Five Steps to Improve your Lead Generation Efforts

Start with these five steps to make strides with your approach to lead generation.

1. Refine your targeting. Spending money and time to cast a wide net on leads that don’t fit the target profile is a waste. Lead quality is directly related to targeting. Targeting

   

   requires knowing whom you want to do business with, their problem and how to best reach them before you begin any program. Good targeting, based on solid research, accelerates the conversion-to-customer ratio (a key metric for many demand generation marketers). Build your metrics around conversion-to-prospect, rather than cost/response to avoid inflating campaign lead volume.By focusing on cost-to-conversion-to-customer, the emphasis will be more on the quality of leads than the quantity. This makes for more effective lead generation programs.  Use multi-touch marketing efforts to get a response from the primary target’s pool of decision makers. It creates frustration when the company has to manage a large influx of leads that miss the mark because they are a “poor fit.” This is why it is essential to have a lead scoring model. When leads continuously end up in the dead pool, the sales team begins to assume all the leads associated with a campaign are not worth following up on. This leads to the next step. 

2. Collaborate with the Sales team. A demand and/or lead generation program that goes out the door without sales input and buy-in is at risk. Ultimately Sales will assume ownership and cultivation of the leads. It will be up to them to convert prospects to customers. Be sure they are in agreement with the objectives of the program, and as much as possible, share the accountability of success for the campaign conversion to customer together. Having the Sales team on board ensures that cultivation of the leads is a priority. Marketing and Sales should jointly agree on the objectives in a lead generation effort and communicate how both teams will be accountable. This is essential to aligning the Sales and Marketing teams.
3. Control lead flow. Use multiple, highly targeted efforts to control the flow of leads. This will require that you keep direct mail and email drops small, with focused phone follow-ups. As a result, you will have a great opportunity to identify a qualified lead and act quickly to convert the lead to a prospect.
4. Use personalized, integrated approaches to boost response. Research suggests that integrated, multi-touch marketing boosts response rates by increasing the odds that your message will reach your prospect, and have a higher recall rate. Research also shows that the more personal and relevant the messages are, the higher the response rate. Print small lots of direct mail so you can tailor the messages and personalize the messages to each recipient. Consider displaying a personalized URL on each mail piece to send the target to a personalized landing page with pre-filled forms, making it much easier for the responder to submit a profile. This can result in significantly higher profile capture rates. It may have a higher up-front cost, but if the targeting has been done properly, the conversion ratio should justify the investment. If you’re going after high-level decision makers, remember that each of these folks have their own preference on what they respond to, which is why it takes an integrated multi-touch effort to get their response. Make sure your integrated solutions can track complete contact history so you’ll know when to suspend efforts on prospects that have had over X number of contacts without a response. Contact history trend analysis helps reveal the optimal contact strategy and which channels are most effective.
5. Create and implement a lead capture process. Before any campaign goes out the door, make sure you have a tested system in place to capture and process the leads. Otherwise, it’s very possible a key lead will get lost in the shuffle.

Whether you use this process or something else, make sure you have the processes in place to effectively capture and process the leads. There’s nothing worse than having interested opportunities exhibiting buying behavior slip through the cracks because you do not have the internal processes in place that are synced to your customer’s buying journey.  We know this sounds easier said then done. We can help you do it.  Let’s talk today.

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