Every marketer dreams of a consistent stream of leads that all convert to customers. In an ideal world, leads would flood in within days (or even hours) of implementing a demand generation campaign: be it a direct mail campaign, B2B telemarketing initiative or content marketing strategy. The reality is that leads aren’t available on tap, let alone ones that automatically convert. B2B demand generation involves a lot more work—and a lot more uncertainty. While quantity is desirable, quality is far more important when it comes to measuring the success of your B2B demand generation efforts.
Quantity at the expense of quality is bad news for ROI
What’s wrong with the old strategy of amassing as many leads as possible and praying for the best? Surely with more leads, there’s the potential for higher sales? That’s true, but only if those leads are of high quality. Unfortunately, the quantity approach often brings in lower quality leads, especially if you’ve bought a database of leads. Lower quality leads are less likely to convert to sales, which means that the time and resources that go into nurturing them is wasted—bad news for the ROI potential of your marketing strategy.
Marketing data and highly targeted lead generation tactics have made quality the measure of successful B2B demand generation
So why has quality become the key indicator of successful B2B demand generation? Marketing data, combined with highly targeted lead generation tactics such as content marketing and B2B telemarketing, have given marketers the tools to become more focused when it comes to reaching out to their audiences. The more focused one can be with marketing campaigns, the better quality leads you can—and should—expect. Otherwise you need to rethink your whole strategy. The lack of technology in the past meant it simply wasn’t possible to generate high-quality leads; brands had no choice but to rely on generating higher numbers of leads to make sales.
Lead scoring helps you identify the quality leads
Let’s say you’ve generated a handful of high-quality leads. How do you actually know whether they’re high quality and that your demand generation efforts are paying off? For the purposes of inbound and content marketing, lead scoring is an important process for identifying leads that are worth nurturing down the sales funnel. Leads are given scores based on certain behaviours: for example, a lead who signs up to your newsletter will get a lower score than one who requests a quote. (Of course, in practice, the scoring process is more in-depth.) You can prioritise leads based on their score to determine which to invest time and resources into.
For the purposes of telemarketing, however, a much higher number of leads will be deemed as high quality compared to those generated through inbound marketing. For that reason, using the BANT methodology to score leads is more appropriate.
Lead scoring might help you identify quality leads, to see whether your demand generation efforts are on track, but how exactly you generate demand will be influenced by your target audiences. If you’d like to explore how an inbound marketing strategy can be blended with outbound marketing to improve your B2B demand generation efforts, download our guide:
