CFOs are placing more scrutiny on demand generation spend than ever before, due to increasing customer acquisition costs and stagnant win rates. To determine the performance of your pipeline, you will need to perform a diagnostic evaluation of the individual architectural layers of the pipeline, where signal degradation and handoff failures occur.
A thorough B2B lead generation audit outlines a structured, five-layer diagnostic model that can be used to identify revenue leakages more clearly. It also ensures the go-to-market strategy aligns with the current buying habits of customers.
What We Found
The abundance of leads can often mask deep-rooted structural problems. Research shows 80% of leads are never converted to a sale. In addition, 42% of B2B companies state their biggest challenge is irrelevant leads.
Although pressure continues to mount on marketing departments to produce marketing qualified leads (MQLs), few companies are placing emphasis on the quality of their leads. You cannot correct these gaps by simply generating additional traffic.
Instead of addressing symptoms, revenue operations must evaluate the entire system. By correcting even a few of the broken stages in the pipeline, you have the potential to reduce your cost per lead (CPL) by as much as 30% to 40%.
Examples from international cases demonstrate a dramatic decrease in localized CPL; for example, in one case study, a reviewed and corrected system resulted in a reduction from R4,200 to R980.
Evaluate your performance on the following:
Quantify the target profiles with closed-won data, as opposed to relying on historical profiles.
Implement a policy with a strict Service Level Agreement (SLA) that requires inbound calls to be responded to within five minutes.
Map multi-channel data to determine the 8-11 individuals involved in typical business buying decisions.
Replace vanity metrics with tangible indicators of revenue performance; use pipeline contribution, customer acquisition cost, etc.
Completing a B2B Lead Generation Audit for Target Profiles
Numerous companies maintain their business model on unfounded assumptions regarding the identity and characteristics of their ideal buyers. Over time, the profile of a target will shift.
If you don’t continually revise your definition and adapt it to the ever-changing market conditions, you will run the risk of wasting money on generating demand for the wrong accounts.
Checking Your Targets Against Closed Deals
An outdated ideal customer profile (ICP) will pollute all metrics from that point forward. A minimum of 30% up to 40% of all outbound activities are frequently aimed towards businesses that are no longer a fit for your ideal customer.
To get this back on track during your B2B lead generation audit, take the data from your closed-won deals over the past two quarters and run a comparison of the firmographics, revenue size and technology stacks for the closed won deals versus all of the attributes in your active target profile.
If your marketing automation systems such as Marketo and HubSpot are routing leads based on criteria from three years ago, your pipeline will definitely suffer. Make sure to align your scoring models with companies’ attributes that are currently paying you.
Reaching Everyone Who Buys
The idea of a single-buyer is dead. Today, the number of people involved in making a purchase from a business has gone from a maximum of one to often including as many as 8-11 members of a buying committee.
A proper diagnostic requires that you take into consideration whether your lead capture methodology is accounting for the larger number of people involved in the purchasing process.
If you’re primarily targeting executives in your campaigns, you’re missing out on the people who play the pivotal roles of technical evaluation and financial endorsement of the purchase decision.
Your messaging should address the entire committee; your target account-focused strategies are a better representation of the reality than a single-lead optimization strategy.
How to Track Buyer Signals
By the time buyers fill out a form, they’ve already evaluated your company. Today’s demand-generation efforts involve intercepting signals from prospects on multiple platforms, including company websites, as well as third-party intent data.
Getting the Most Out of High-Intent Channels
The majority of companies utilize disparate channels to track prospective clients' activities on the internet. For example, many businesses will track their contact information through solutions like ZoomInfo while leveraging other platforms such as 6sense and Demandbase to monitor their prospective clients' intent signals.
However, each of these channels remains independent of one another. Therefore, it is important to evaluate how these channels work together.
When managing an intent signal through an AI solution, the intent signal is lost within a few days; therefore, if your sales team takes weeks to act, your investment in that intent signal is wasted.
As a result, it is imperative that your data's architecture is built to automatically deliver your high-intent signals directly into your sales team's daily workflows.
Checking How Well Your Lead Sources Work
All lead sources are not created equal. While lead sources generating substantial amounts of form fills tend to be much less effective at converting leads into SQLs, it is critical that you maintain specific conversion rate metrics on each source to identify which lead sources have the greatest potential for generating revenue.
Multi-channel lead generation campaigns have been shown to have significantly lower costs per lead (CPLs) (up to 31% lower than single-channel lead gen campaigns). Content marketing continues to provide substantial value to businesses; 93% of all B2B businesses report generating more of their sales pipeline through content than other traditional lead generation methods.
As part of your B2B lead generation audit, it is critical to identify the lead sources that are generating revenue for your business and to eliminate any lead sources that produce nothing but noise.
Checking How You Qualify Leads
Connecting marketing and sales together is one of the biggest key points for success in B2B organizations. With definitions unclear, marketing may pass leads over that would not be considered qualified, or sales will overlook unqualified leads through no clear consensus.
Hence, both departments waste budget resources acquiring bad or weak leads and therefore lose the trust of one another.
Setting Clear Rules for Passing Leads
In the B2B space, the benchmark for conversion of MQLs into SQLs is somewhere between 13% - 20%. If your conversion rate is below 13%, there is a good chance that your lead qualification scoring system is ineffective.
You need to have a very clear definition of what constitutes an SQL, as you will not only want to train your marketing & sales teams to use the correct definition, but ultimately, you will need to establish an SLA between the two departments.
It is imperative that marketing and sales work together to ensure a smooth transition from a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL). Both teams must have mutual understanding of the same lead assessment criteria.
Many organizations utilize various frameworks such as BANT, MEDDIC or CHAMP to evaluate potential deals. However, it is critical that marketing and sales utilize the same verbiage when using these frameworks.
Keeping Scoring Models Current
All scoring systems should reflect what actual leads do. A whitepaper download does not hold the same level of intent as a demo request, or an individual who has visited your pricing page multiple times.
Review your lead scoring points and point decay rules frequently. A lead may have been very active six months ago, but after six months of no activity, that lead should no longer have a high score.
Review your scoring regularly, i.e., quarterly, to preserve proper alignment with the lead's activity profile.
Following Up Quickly
To succeed in marketing and sales, speed will always be a major differentiator from competition. Follow-up speed will eliminate potential attrition of qualified leads due to price point signals.
When a marketing qualified lead (MQL) has been flagged, a benchmark for inbound lead-handoff to be less than five (5) minutes is recommended. Once five (5) minutes have elapsed, the chances of connecting with the lead are exponentially decreased.
Review your lead routing procedures for processing and assignment. There should be no delays in lead assignments due to unassigned lead queues. Automation should assign high priority leads to the appropriate sales representative with the necessary context.
Smoothing Out Multi-Channel Messaging
Unscheduled outreach messages in multi-channel environments frustrate leads. By coordinating outreach messages across multiple channels, and synchronising your message across all media platforms, leads will receive a consistent message, increasing your chances of converting leads into sales-qualified prospects.
Through Tapistro, Clearbit, etc., it's possible to coordinate the timing and messaging of these multiple forms of communication and the timing and content of the marketing and sales process for a single customer.
This in essence enables a clearer and more aligned path for the customer toward the final proposal phase, as indicated by the fact that a healthy proposal to close ratio is between 25% and 40%.
Proving the Value of Your Marketing
To be able to substantiate your demand gen expenditure (investments) and prove how your demand generation efforts have influenced pipeline creation, it is necessary to be able to show how much each dollar spent has contributed directly to pipeline creation. This is done through the use of well-defined, specific attribution models designed to meet the needs of finance and marketing teams.
The reporting trend of simply reporting on the number of leads created is now becoming obsolete, as the simple volume of leads has little to no correlation to whether or not they will actually close. Many businesses are beginning to feel the impact of the transition away from simply measuring lead volume to measuring at the account level.
Measuring at the Account Level
During a comprehensive B2B lead generation audit, you should also be measuring CAC, SQL win rates, and pipeline contribution(s) from marketing channels to have an entire view of how your marketing efforts are contributing to your business.
About 22% of businesses are satisfied with their current conversion rates due to the fact that they are measuring the wrong information. You will build a reasonable case for future investment in marketing by connecting each dollar you spend on marketing to specific pipeline outcomes.
Reviewing Your Metrics Often
Last, a single review cycle is not adequate for monitoring for changes in these metrics, as the marketplace changes rapidly. Organizations with an established, formal structure for reviewing these types of items experience increased win rates of anywhere from 15% to 20%.
Utilize revenue intelligence tools like Gong to examine sales conversations and to incorporate this knowledge into your marketing campaigns as well as scheduling deep diagnostics once a quarter at a minimum.
Make it clear who will own the data and establish dates when scoring models must be updated (and how), list refinement activities should take place (and how) and define procedures for maximizing response time for both marketing and sales teams.
Look Deeper Than Simple Checklists
Superficial checklists do not work for modern revenue teams! To repair a pipeline that has gone awry, you must dig deeper than just examining email subject lines and begin auditing the architected underpinnings that create the pipeline.
Once you align precision targeting, signal reach, qualification rules, orchestration speed, and measurement accuracy, your pipeline will leak less revenue that adds to the expense of your marketing budget. Thus, treat demand creation as one continuous system.
Produce results based solely on quantifiable numbers, rely on strict handoff rules, and continuously refine how you implement your demand creation programs to generate high-value revenue outcomes.
Common Problems and How to Fix Them
High Lead Volume Does Not Mean Good Leads
A high lead volume typically suggests that you have an issue with your scoring model, or you’ve drifted away from your ideal target profile.
When marketing optimizes their programs for form fill, rather than account level intent, you will invariably flood the system with users who meet your basic demographic criteria but have no buying intent. Sales reps now have the unfortunate task of filtering out bad data instead of selling!
How Fast Does Lead Data Lose Value If Sales Delays Outreach?
Intent decays within days! If a buyer is researching a solution, they are likely researching competitors at the same time.
By delaying your outreach by just two days, you are now competing for a conversation that the buyer has already started with a competitor. You must get routing latency down to hours (and ideally minutes) for your most critical signals.
What is the Best Way to Align Marketing and Sales on Qualification Criteria?
To align your marketing and sales teams, first agree upon a common definition of a sales qualified lead (SQL) based on closed-won data.
Also establish a binding agreement regarding the specific actions that will trigger a handoff between sales and marketing (i.e., behavioral triggers: multiple price page views + exact job title match).
When Should Revenue Operations Conduct Full Diagnostics?
At least once a quarter. The market trends, buyer behavior, and technology capabilities change too rapidly for annual planning!
Therefore, running a full B2B lead generation audit each quarter will provide you with the assurance that your scoring models are still aligned with your market, as well as keeping response times sharp and budget allocations continuously being distributed to channels generating the most revenue.