How many of your leads should come from inbound marketing? How about 100%?
The question is how many of your leads should come from your inbound marketing program? 0% or 100% or somewhere in between.
Typical presentation from Marketing in corporations:
In the last quarter (year or other interval), we landed 4% of our customers via the Marketing efforts. Translated for every 100 sales made (real orders, business), 4 came from the Marketing team’s programs and efforts. Many of them came from a social mixer they had (which I don’t count, but that’s for a later topic).
There was a financial person sitting next to me in the meeting and asked me the question “How many should we expect to come from Marketing’s programs, 10-20% or more?”
My reply apparently was shocking. I said we should expect 100% of our sales to come from leads from Marketing programs!
Premise
Marketing programs, 
especially inbound programs should generate all your leads, 100%. Here’s why. If you have performed all the hard work around building a funnel, then you should work on attaining the goal of 100% of getting those exact target customers.
A Sales Qualified Lead is identifying the target prospect has a need, that your product solves, better than other competitors, from a trusted company (you), and they are ready to buy now.
Why would you not want all the customers to come in as Sales Qualified Leads?
Or maybe, you’d rather have your Sales team choosing on their own what makes a Qualified lead, which customers to chase, and spinning their wheels with a lot of activity, but no results. I didn’t think so. So why do this?
Benefits
This clearly would lead to:
- More opportunities to close (higher percentage of wins)
- A shorter close cycle
- Higher quota attainment rates for sales teams
You also spend more time with quality prospects instead of trying to convince non-quality prospects they should buy your product (and maybe they don’t need it or aren’t ready).
Your sales team will spend time on good business, not chase bad business. Or worse, doing unproductive tasks (like smile and dial). And guess what, they’ll be happy you sent them good leads.
What business would not want these benefits?
Speed bump
Potentially you may not get to 100% (or above 4%) any time soon due to some potential issues, but they all involve mainly ignoring the work that needs to be done, in every business. Do the hard work, bite the bullet up front. You’ll be glad you did down the road.
- Identify what makes a Key target customer prospect or Buyer Personas (or prospects, you may have more than one type)
- Identify what makes a Sales Qualified Lead, and gain consensus between Sales and Marketing.
- Identify strategies to assist the prospects through the buyer journey. Attract, Convert, Close, Delight.
- Build tactical programs to work on steps in the process. Not the whole journey at once.
Summary
If you put together an effective Inbound Marketing Program, you’ll see real Sales results. Totally effective and you’ll get 100% of your Sales that started as leads. Your revenue will increase, your sales teams will be more productive. Don’t solve the whole world in one leap. 8% is better than 4%, 50% is way better! Set targets, run programs, keep the ones that work and ditch the ones that don’t, but always increase. Moved toward getting to 100%!
Now we can put that 4% number behind us and really shoot for the larger percentage, you’ll see your improved results sooner than you think.
