I got a call this past week from a marketing manager that worked for a previous client of ours. It was odd to hear from her, as I had been thinking about their program the week before. I was wondering “what every happened to all those leads?†You see, we ran a very short, 3-4 months, lead qualification program for them. They had been successful at lead generation and were pulling in over 200-300 leads a week through multiple channels such as webinars, white papers, trial downloads. The problem of lead generation was not quantity, but quality. We proceeded to pre-qualify the highest scoring leads from their system. Leads that met qualification guidelines for sales were then passed along. Although, the quality of leads making it to sales from our program was good, few deals were closing right away. This was not unusual for us, as this was an enterprise focused program with a minimum sales cycle of 3-6 months. In any event, the company pulled the plug on several marketing lead generation efforts including our program. At the time, I knew this was premature.
Fast forward 9 months to now, I get a call and what do you know, it’s the marketing manager from this very company. She had taken a new position and wanted to run a similar program. Turns out, that after the program ended she continued to track the results. At month 5, just a month after the plug was pulled the deals started to fall. At 10 months our program, which cost the company less than $11,000 returned over $250,000 in revenues. For those who are counting (you know who you are), that’s over a 2100% return.
I believe for the most part, that people know lead generation today affects revenues next quarter in the enterprise space. This is why it can be hard for some companies to commit. They want to know immediately what affects if any their investment is having. The good news is there are a few key things that indicate early on that a program will be successful. I will cover these in the near future.
For now just remember that “patience is a virtueâ€, and one that few companies can afford to overlook.
Tim,
You know how common that is — let’s face it — buyers are in the buyers cycle — they are not concerned about the sales cycle — your team did their part — and the chickens hatched 10 months down the road — for Enterprise — it can take 12 months for the leads to “hatch” — now will that get you the account? “we’ll see outstanding results inside of 12 months” — no — because even in this day and age, VP of Sales are operating off of telemarketing cliches when it comes to B2B lead generation — and the ones that are not are under so much pressure to make their number that they won’t be around in 6 months — I’ve launched Enterprise B2B lead generation programs and have had C Level want to “go over the results” on the third day of the program….get real…they can avoid this by doing building up their B2B marketing database — and how about these apples — just like weight training — where do you want to be in 12 months? Let’s solve this empty funnel problem and be in a different spot a year from now….start today!
Great article Tim. One of the things I have found with sales and marketing folks is that we tend to be impatient, and most managers don’t really understand their sales cycle. I think some simple data analysis would reveal where the holes are in their system and they could frequently fix HUGE issues with little to no outlay of cash. Instead they tend to throw money at the problem. Its good for those in the consulting business, but shutting down a marketing campaign that is producing good leads after 3 months when you know you have a 9 month sales cycle is just too soon!