Many business to business owners, large and small, continue to struggle to create demand for their products and services. The first goal is obviously to create demand in order to develop a sales funnel. Once the leads you have created are in the funnel the challenge becomes lead conversion. In order to determine the impact a marketing campaign you have created is having on your ability to create demand and fill the sales funnel with leads, you have to look at sales.

Most marketing departments create lead generation programs that are not highly successful when it comes to closing sales. Research tells us that 90% of the leads that demand generation campaigns are not followed up. An amazingly low 6% of leads get into the sales process. So, if closed deals from initial responses to an offer is only 2.3% that leads us to believe that most campaigns do not mean more results. It’s worthwhile to stop and ask ourselves, “What are some of the factors that contribute to these less than stellar results?” One answer we often find is that sales people are too busy following up on current customers (the 80/20 rule) and go where the business is now rather than spend the required amount of time and effort to chase unqualified leads.

The dilemma for marketing then becomes the relatively quick disengagement with the marketing programs if leads do not convert to sales in a timely manner. More campaigns do not necessarily mean more results; therefore a company’s marketing “spend” is not optimized.

We advise our clients that marketers and customer service need to own leads for a longer period of time so that they are qualified when the go to sales. We have a process we call Accountable Marketing™ to help B2B companies with High Performance Demand. Henderson Robb combines research, strategy, creative, branding (execution of programs) and technology to create demand, provide metrics to deliver a measurable return on marketing dollars invested.

To get an informed opinion from us on how to turn your company’s marketing programs into increased sales simply visit www.hendersonrobb.com, send us an email or call to request for more information.