Learn from the best! This valuable report identifies best practices in lead scoring and prioritization by analyzing the processes, capabilities, and performance of 180 top performing organizations. The Aberdeen Group offers hard numbers demonstrating increased revenue, higher conversion rates and lower cost per conversion at companies using lead scoring and prioritization.
All companies are pressured to maximize sales and marketing effectiveness to increase conversion, increase lead to sales revenue, and increase top-line revenue. This study explores the strategic value of lead scoring and prioritization techniques and isolates the processes, capabilities and technology enablers that allow Best-in-Class organizations to achieve superior performance in revenue, lead conversion rates, and cost per lead.
Andrew Gaffney, Editor & Publisher of DemandGen Report, shows how innovative companies will emerge stronger after a recession. These organizations are studying the sales and marketing funnel and meticulously pinpointing where improvements in conversion rates can reap the greatest payoff.
Innovative organizations aren’t simply seeking to ‘weather the storm.’ In fact, many are intently studying the economics of the sales and marketing funnel and meticulously pinpointing where improvements in conversion rates can reap the greatest payoff in top-line revenue growth.
As competition intensifies and growth expectations increase, B2B marketers are under pressure to deliver measurable results and clearly demonstrate the value they provide. To succeed in this new era of accountability, marketers must consistently reach the right people through the right channels with the right message. Those targets must convert to sales leads, pipeline and revenue with some degree of predictability.
To drive marketing performance to new levels, B2B marketers have begun to embrace the concept of integrated demand generation and acquire the skills necessary to maximize their investments in underlying platform technologies. Unlike point solutions that enhance marketing in an individual channel, integrated demand generation platforms integrate and synchronize the whole spectrum of offline and online marketing channels, including email, direct mail, advertising, the Web, call centers, trade shows, partners and the sales force.
How leading companies are using management techniques, traditionally applied to manufacturing, to optimize and accelerate the demand generation process.
Today’s B2B companies face serious challenges: increasingly saturated marketing channels, difficult-to-reach prospects and competition for buyers’ attention. To greatly influence sales conversions, companies need to start at the top of the sales funnel - where prospects are identified, interest is captured, demand is generated and leads are nurtured. Marketers need to be able to clearly see the opportunities and impediments in their demand generation processes, so they’re better able to break the bottlenecks, eliminate waste and strategically allocate resources to produce results. Many of today’s leading companies are implementing management techniques traditionally used in manufacturing for this demand generation process.
The traditional B2B transaction has been almost entirely a sales function rooted in face-to-face interactions. The best sales professionals were highly adept at reading buying signals revealed during in-person meetings. As the buying process moves online, salespeople are getting less face time with clients. They are increasingly dependent on their marketing teams to provide insights into which prospects are showing the strongest buying signals.
Over the past two to three years, the buying cycle for complex B2B products and services has fundamentally changed. As the buying process moves online, salespeople are getting less face time with clients. They are increasingly dependent on their marketing teams to provide them with insights into which of their prospects are showing the strongest buying signals.
CSOs and CMOs are realizing that they need to find ways to help sales reps achieve higher targets by increasing their efficiency. Now many executives want to understand which investments assure the highest results?
As CSOs and CMOs realize they to make their salespeople more effective, they strive to optimize lead generation. CSO Insights, a sales research firm, recently completed a Sales Performance Optimization study of 1,275 firms worldwide. The study found that companies excelling at demand generation program management – the art of clearly identifying a lead, delivering the targeted message to the prospect and tracking all activity to better understand the process – had higher conversion rates with more salespeople meeting their quotas.
There is an opportunity to realize significant gains in the selling process by optimizing what happens at the top end of the sales funnel - particularly the way leads are handled before they get passed onto sales. How can marketing seize this opportunity? One way is to improve and automate what many companies already do manually: lead scoring.
Companies must quantify the value of leads, or prospect assets, based on their expected value. Lead scoring systems make the top end of the sales funnel more efficient by enabling marketing to organize, prioritize and nurture leads before they are given to sales. Lead scores can track prospects’ behavior, including web and promotion response activity, creating dynamic scores that can increase or decrease over time.
