In light of her upcoming training course on 24 January, Shane Redding chats to Molly Raycraft about where marketers are going wrong in their lead generation and how they can plug the leaky bucket.
Is it possible to have both a high quality and quantity of leads?
It’s possible but it will depend on your target market, there are some in which you soon reach the threshold of volume or quality. It also depends on the objective of your campaign. I talk about three Vs on my training course, which is another way of talking about quality and quantity. I talk about volume, value, and velocity – which is the speed at which your leads convert. Velocity can affect your quantity and quality.
People pursue volume at the expense of value. They think they must have a thousand leads to hit their target. That’s completely wrong, you may only need ten leads of amazing quality to close five of them. You’d be better doing that. That’s where things often go wrong.
How are you going to help marketers on your course?
I want them to truly understand the definition of a lead in their organisation. It’s definitely the most valuable exercise that we do on the course. Out of the 15 people who attend, only one or two actually have a lead definition in place.
If you create a really robust definition it makes your marketing much more effective because you’re doing what’s appropriate to target them, rather than just bombarding them.
There are steps I go through to define leads at their different stages, and that’s when it becomes really powerful. If you don’t understand where a prospect is in their journey you won’t know what to do with them next.
What are the common problems people hit in their lead generation campaign?
There is commonly a lack of definition on what constitutes a lead and sometimes confusion over the difference between lead generation and demand generation.
Demand generation brings people in at the top of the funnel, creating more general interest. Lead generation focuses on leads that convert to sales in a specified time frame, but the company must agree internally what constitutes a solid lead to them.
Are sales qualified leads really valued more than marketing qualified leads?
The reason sales will reject leads or think less of them is because they haven’t sat down with marketing and gone through the lead definition process. Therefore, you might think you’ve sent through amazing leads, but they’re not amazing leads because they’re not ready to buy.
Sales work to a very different timeline to marketing, they’re looking to close in a quarter, sometimes in a month and have short-term KPIs to hit, whereas in marketing it’s much longer. If marketing don’t understand that and don’t use that to find out which leads should be passed to sales to work, that’s when you get friction.
Is lead scoring always effective?
One of the problems with martech today is that people have become too reliant on it for their lead scoring. You can create quite good scores based on somebody’s digital footprint. But you need to understand who is a student researching a paper versus an in-market buyer with a budget. You could have someone who has a fantastic digital score to create an MQL, but they’ll never buy.
The majority of B2B is still not that sophisticated, the tech companies might be, but most in B2B are not taking that digital footprint and integrating it with CRM to create a proper score based on opportunity.
You use the metaphor of a leaky bucket to explain lead capture. Could you explain what you mean by that?
The leaky bucket is the result of inefficient lead processes. Leads leave your process because there’s a structural failure. In effect it’s a forced abdication; you’ve opened the door and you’ve slammed it in their face. That happens surprisingly a lot.
There are lots of different reasons you leak leads, businesses that are efficient and most profitable work really hard to plug the holes because otherwise they’ve got to go out to the market and attract all those people back again.
One common reason for people falling out the pipeline is that sales don’t get the chance to talk to a lead long enough so they go to a competitor. Imagine you’re a busy salesperson, you’re off to an event, talking to all the people at the event. You’ve then got to follow up those people and in the same week marketing delivers you another 500 leads from a campaign.
It might also be that you lose a lead right at the top of the funnel because your marketing processes are broken. The classic mistakes are a broken link in an email or a landing page that’s gone down.
Do those faults ultimately lie with marketing?
Sometimes marketers can have amazing campaigns but there are parts of it they can’t control and deliver on. For example, the first time a lead calls sales and the phone isn’t answered.
The problem is when you’re in marketing, you control your bit, and there’s another part of the organisation that has to deliver their piece and it’s not aligned. Alignment in your lead generation programme is really important. One of the things we talk about on the course is that for your external lead gen campaigns to be a success you must ensure you’ve done internal marketing and that the people who’ve got to deliver their part are aware of the programme as well.
What other advice do you have on setting the right metrics?
The most important thing is to measure each step so you’re then able to set the right objectives. You must ensure that your leads give you the best opportunity to accelerate the sales pipeline.
Get the right metric at each stage of the sales pipeline; by doing that you’re able to understand where you might have problems.
If you’re really good at generating leads at the top of the funnel but aren’t good at converting, that should tell you they’re probably not the best quality leads or your process is a metaphorical leaky bucket. You’re losing people before you’ve got a chance to move them through the funnel.
