Marketing teams have been measuring the wrong metrics since before the introduction of digital marketing.

A new report published by ReachForce (now Leadspace) shows that on average sales teams are starving due to lack of qualified pipeline. Most companies treat B2B lead generation as a simple exercise to collect emails, but this is not truly the case.

B2B lead generation is an exact science that follows a defined mathematical process to identify ideal business buyers, capture their interest, and run this data through stringent qualification rules to generate a sales-ready conversation.

The Death of the Traditional Marketing Funnel

The traditional marketing funnel is no longer viable as modern business buyers do not wait for a vendor to provide them with education.

Modern business buyers actively research products on their own terms. Most will form an opinion or two before they even talk to a salesperson. Generating B2B leads in today's environment is similar to trying to find a signal in a completely dark room.

It is critical to simultaneously align inbound and outbound content with inbound and outbound target marketing if you want to find and capture the prospect. Therefore, if your marketing team is unable to show the relationship between a top-of-funnel campaign and the revenue generated from closed business, then your marketing department is failing.

Understanding B2B Buyer Behavior and Journey

Marketing departments typically create campaigns based on the assumption that buyers would like to have a conversation with them prior to purchasing anything.

There is a vast amount of data demonstrating that this is not the case. In reality, buyers have moved away from having all of their questions answered by sales representatives to conducting independent research during their overall buying journey.

Independently Researching Products

Only 17% of the time that buyers spend in their buying journey is spent talking directly to the supplier.

At least the other 83% of the time, buyers are conducting their independent research, determining which features or aspects of a product they prefer, debating with their colleagues about which products to consider and actually starting their buying journey with an online search.

93% of all B2B buying processes begin with an online search. By the time a potential buyer fills out a form, they may have already completed an initial determination of what they want to buy.

This means it is extremely critical to complete the visibility to the prospective buyer within the first part of their journey. More than 62% of buyers will consume multiple pieces of content before they ever speak to a vendor.

If your company relies only on cold outreach to create demand for its products, then you are fighting a losing battle against other companies who are already educating your potential customers.

The Complexity of B2B Buying Committees

Most B2B purchases are not made by just one individual; about 77% of buyers report their last purchase was very complicated.

Therefore, your lead generation efforts cannot target just one type of job title, which is why account-based marketing (ABM) has become a popular strategy over the past few years.

In order to execute an ABM strategy, you must identify all members of the buying committee and provide different messaging for each person, such as the end-user, the financial buyer, and the executive sponsor.

How to Capture B2B Demand and Generate Leads

Generating raw traffic to your website is relatively inexpensive; however, generating qualified business intent (i.e., buyers who want to purchase) is much harder and, therefore, much more costly.

The process of capturing demand can be broken down into separating out the "noise" from the actual purchasing intent.

Alignment of Inbound and Outbound Marketing

The highest quality sales pipelines leverage both inbound and outbound marketing channels as complementary sources of demand generation.

Inbound marketing channels like SEO, whitepapers, case studies, and webinars generate demand from buyers who are actively searching for solutions.

Conversely, outbound marketing channels include social selling on LinkedIn, targeted email sequences, and native ads to create demand within target accounts where buyers are not yet actively searching for solutions.

Neither inbound nor outbound marketing functions effectively alone; outbound efforts will not create buyer trust unless a prospect has already proven that they are interested in a particular product, and inbound efforts cannot generate enough volume alone because of the slow pace at which prospects begin to trust your company.

What is a Lead Magnet and Why Do I Need One?

Most buyers know their contact information is a valuable asset. Most buyers are not willing to share their personal contact information with a company so that they can provide generic advice.

Lead magnets must support and address buyers' immediate and painful issues. A generic industry report will likely only attract students and junior staff members, not the decision-makers in your target companies.

To entice decision-makers, it is important to provide them with a specific operational template or deep data analysis.

It should be said that the goal should not simply be to maximize downloads; rather, the aim of maximizing downloads is to get those downloads from the right decision-makers.

Visitor Identification and Intent Signals

In today's digital landscape, most buyers do not fill out forms and therefore do not present themselves as leads.

However, with the use of visitor identification and intent data, businesses now have the ability to identify the companies that are browsing their websites without providing any identifying information.

With Leadfeeder, a specific tool, businesses can filter their prospect database through more than 50 different data filters and access the database of more than 60 million companies and 400 million verified contacts, which provides sales teams with the ability to know which accounts are exhibiting active intent to buy prior to ever requesting a demo from the business.

Taking Raw Lead Data to a Qualified Sales Pipeline

A lead is not an opportunity, but simply raw material.

To transition from raw data to a pipeline, there are strict processes, methods for scoring leads, and rules governing CRM automation.

MQL vs. SQL

This is the point in which many businesses fail. The transition from marketing to sales is where companies will often have a very high drop-off of leads.

Most companies will find that, on average, between 35% and 45% of all raw leads ever become an MQL, and the transition from MQL to SQL is a very steep drop-off as it is estimated that only 15% of MQLs will convert into SQLs.

The qualification threshold that marketing has established is too loose; thus, when a lead is scored simply by opening three marketing emails, sales will often find that they are wasting time chasing unqualified leads.

Basic Lead Scoring and Artificial Intelligence

Basic lead scoring is primarily subjective in nature. As the advanced teams are utilizing AI-driven scoring and lookalike modeling to map real-world buying activity onto a prospect's journey, they need to reevaluate their scoring methodology.

A visit to a pricing page has far more significance than viewing a blog post. Likewise, attending a webinar will result in a higher likelihood of making a purchase than simply liking something on social media.

Therefore, it is critical that the scoring logic of these organizations mirrors the actions that actually precede the closing of a deal instead of simply mirroring the events that can be easily measured.

CRM Data Quality and Handoff Rules

The quality of your data within your CRM directly impacts the success of your marketing and sales programs.

If your CRM has a high percentage of duplicate contacts or inactive email addresses, you will see your automation efforts fail at some point. To improve the quality of leads generated by your CRM, you must have objective handoff rules for transfer of leads to the sales team.

What fields within the CRM must be completed prior to handoff to sales? What is the longest amount of time that a lead can request contact before being routed to a sales rep?

The win rate for leads will be nearly zero if they have been waiting for a response for more than 24-hours in the routing queue. Very fast response time and having accurate and complete data in your CRM will be your competitive advantages.

Performance Benchmarks by Channel

Performance benchmarks for each channel should be based on a comparison to the average within your industry.

The performance of each channel varies widely due to the difference in types of purchasing intent.

Digital Search and SEO Benchmarks

Digital Search produces some of the best "math" within a buying cycle. Leads derived from SEO typically convert at a rate of approximately 14.6 percent, while referred leads convert at approximately 29.1 percent.

Trust is transferred from the referring party directly to your company. There is no need to nurture these leads for several months before a purchase occurs.

Email Marketing and Webinars

The average email open rate for B2B emails is approximately 21.3 percent. When utilizing cold lists without intent data, expect to see your open rate drop substantially.

This contrasts sharply with the actual results from webinars, which typically produce much higher rates. Webinars are typically associated with more qualified leads than traditional gated-content pieces (e.g. whitepapers) by 2-3x.

However, this increased quality of lead comes with an execution 'tax'—it is common for planners to expect no-shows to be between 40 and 50% of digital events. Thus, planners should filter for commitment based on the number of no-shows they experience at each event.

Trade Shows and Field Operations

The overall budget for hosting a physical event is generally significantly larger than hosting an online event. However, they provide planners with a direct opportunity to interact face-to-face with many potential customers.

Well-run trade booth setups at a trade show typically yield 5-7 qualified leads per hour.

In particularly aggressive trade show booth setups, such as those used by our client Brandcave, results scale at an unbelievable pace—with Brandcave claiming to have generated over 200 new, qualified contacts in just one day during a physical event.

Software and Execution Landscape

Software will not fix a broken strategy; it simply allows planners to scale what they have already created.

Currently, the majority of the tools in the market are designed to assist with the accumulation, enrichment, and routing of data without any delay from a human reader.

Campaigns and Content Engines

Enterprise brands, such as Zendesk, SAP, and ON24, dominate the enterprise marketplace by providing massive data tracking capabilities in addition to their content delivery capabilities.

Tools such as Heyflow allow marketers to create highly complex lead capture paths using interactive data capture methods. These lead capture paths outperform static lead capture forms.

The primary function of these types of tools is to keep potential buyers engaged while passively scoring their behaviors in the background.

Enrichment of Data and Identity Management

A simple email address is no longer adequate for identifying a potential buyer. Data enrichment platforms like Cognism and Infuse instantaneously supply firmographic, revenue, and technology stack information related to a naked email address.

This enables CRM routing rules to quickly transfer high-value accounts to senior sales representatives, while directing less valuable accounts to automated email sequences.

Google Ads and LinkedIn are currently the primary channels available to implement targeted outreach and lookalike marketing that will replicate your best current customers.

Revenue Leakage and Operation Drop Off Zones

Revenue leaks through your pipeline for internal reasons rather than external market factors.

The Volume Trap

The number of leads equals the number of customers. The industry standard for conversion from lead to customer is a mere 2 percent - 5 percent.

If your conversion rate is at 2 percent, you will need to acquire 500 leads to close just 10 accounts.

It is common for marketers pursuing raw volume to drop their quality standards and fill the head of the funnel with ineffective lead data which will ultimately be ignored by sales teams.

Inability to Establish Clear Acceptance Criteria

Sales and marketing are working in silos when lead generation systems fail.

The lead generation system breaks down when marketing is compensated on lead volume and sales is compensated based on closed revenue. An internal agreement must be established and endorsed by both sales and marketing teams on what qualifies a lead.

If the lead does not satisfy the previously established criteria, it will automatically route back through the automated nurture sequence of the marketing team and never reach any human sales representative.

B2B Lead Generation and Pipeline Economics vs. Final Strategic Output

B2B lead generation revolves around allocation of resources and the management of your data.

The shift in buyer behavior will remain in place indefinitely, as buyers will consistently attempt to conceal their intent, independently research and avoid sales reps until the very last moment.

The companies that achieve success will not be the companies creating the most noise through marketing but rather the companies which can create effective and streamlined operational systems.

Complete disregard for vanity metrics and focus on producing results. A campaign which created 1,000 leads of which none were qualified is going to be a net loss.

A campaign which creates 10 qualified business accounts routed through a clean CRM process to a prepared salesforce creates measurable value. Build your strategy based on MQL-to-SQL survival rates of 15 percent.

Continue to improve the quality of your raw leads, enforce stringent qualifications measures, measure pipeline creation, and automate the remaining process.