As marketers, we work hard to drive high quality leads into the sales pipeline so that account teams can take over and close deals. If the business were a baby, well, the baby’s gotta eat or it can’t grow — and we take pride in making sure there is a steady flow of nutrients coming in the door to support that goal.
And most marketers are pretty talented at capturing leads, but where the food begins to spoil and potential is lost, is when leads must progress past those first marketing touches and cross the divide to sales, where they require a different kind of attention to fully come to fruition.
We decided to run a campaign around motivating our business development and sales teams to help us bridge the gap when we hand off leads from marketing to see how beneficial improved alignment could be to our efforts. So we launched a PPC campaign on LinkedIn, where we’ve historically driven some very high quality leads, and focused our business developers on making a smooth handoff while capitalizing on the potential of these leads.
I’m not going to lie, even we were pretty impressed with the results. Before launching this campaign, we would convert 9.8% of those leads into opportunities, on average. After? 37.7%. That’s right, a 385% increase over our lead to opportunity conversion ratio!
Improvement like this is really felt, so let’s look at a visual demonstrating how much value that increase adds to our efforts (click the gray button to see the difference):
Numbers like this are nothing to yawn at, and it’s not like the business development or sales teams weren’t doing their jobs before the campaign. They were working just as hard, but by adding elements like visibility in the form of a leaderboard quantifying results in real time, improved communication with discussions and strategies occurring as a result of the campaign, and competitiveness with participants vying to make a noticeable impact — the result created an environment that focused our team around this goal, improved efficiency and subsequently drove the results that you see above.
While not all marketers are as concerned with what happens after capturing a lead depending on their incentives, comp structure and goals, I can assure you that this matters to those marketers as well. Think about it — yes, they may not be directly compensated for converting leads into opportunities, but surely all marketers must prove their value, even if just to justify the budget they need to operate and run the necessary campaigns. For us, it will be much easier to justify and gain approval for future spend in these areas since we’re able to clearly show that, not only are we driving these leads in, but they’re becoming opportunities efficiently and at an extremely high rate.
But hey, see for yourself! Take 5 minutes to talk to us and we’ll show you how you can achieve similar results. Click below and we’ll set up a time to chat!
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