Quality over Quantity

Forrester research discovered that less than 1% of the B2B leads convert into customers. The old marketing model of bringing many leads at the top of the funnel without an engagement strategy is something that according to my experience is not going to help marketing to have a positive ROI (return on investment).

If your B2B marketing strategy is mostly focusing on email blasts, form completions and SEO, I imagine there is a lot of time spent on leads that won't convert.

I have seen that some marketing teams celebrate bringing 100 leads that are on the (TOFU) Top of the Funnel to the sales team and then they complain that sales is not doing their job because they are not converting. So you have to ask yourself "How engaged is a lead on the TOFU?"

Lead scoring is key to understand how engaged a lead is. You add points to the lead according to the times they engaged with your content/company. Let me give you an example:

Lead 1: Download a Whitepaper (Lead scoring: 10) Lead 2: Subscribed to a Webinar, Download a Whitepaper and Opened your newsletter (Lead Scoring: 25)

The higher the lead scoring, the warmer the leads are. You have to decide the minimum scoring they should have before sending to sales. Then if the sales managers don't convert, I must say something is wrong with the sales team 😉.

Another topic that I will develop in another post is Account-Based marketing (ABM). ABM is a B2B marketing strategy that focus on a list of target accounts defined by the sales team. It is when sales and marketing work together for better outcomes focused on quality leads and not quantity.

ABM can be applied to new accounts and current customers that you aim to increase the share of wallet by upselling or cross-selling.

More to come about ABM…..