How to get more ROI from your lead generation

Understandably, organisations invest heavily in lead generation to keep the sales funnel well populated. However, the reality is that even with the best lead generation process, a whopping 80% of these leads are often wasted, meaning organisations aren’t getting the best ROI or results.

This is because lead generation is only part of the process. And a robust lead qualification process, that passes the hottest leads straight to sales and triages the rest can dramatically increase sales.

Why does lead generation wastage happen?

Typically leads are generated at the beginning of the sales cycle where prospects express an interest in some way, whether that’s through marketing automation, engaging when you have exhibited at a trade show or exhibition or requested literature or downloaded content from your website.

From this pool of generated leads, the hottest 20% (who we’ll call prospects) will have immediate needs of some sort that will naturally mean they become a key focus for sales teams. These high-potential prospects will want costings, proposals and meetings that require considerable preparation. In turn, this will lead to negotiating terms and converting leads into paying customers – which is of course, the life blood of any sales team.

But, by Pareto’s law, this leaves another 80% of generated leads (who we’ll call suspects) that have no immediate identified need. These suspects may have only stopped at your stand, clicked on your email, or downloaded your brochure because of a possible future need, mild interest, or curiosity - and because your marketing team did a great job in designing your collateral.

These suspects might need your product or service in 6, 12 or even 2 years’ time. This could be because they’re just in the early stages of planning a future project; or they’re locked into a contract for the next two years. Or perhaps they only review their supply chain periodically when they redesign their products. But you will never know which of them are warm and worth nurturing unless you engage and triage them.

As these suspects aren’t showing immediate buying signals, these suspects take time to engage. They’re less likely to pick up the phone or respond to emails as your products aren’t yet high on their priority list, which means salespeople often overlook them as they don’t have time to nurture them between managing hot opportunities, live deals and active pipelines.

Challenges of lead generation wastage

One of the main issues with these suspects is that for busy sales teams with targets to meet, these slow-burning suspects often don’t offer enough short-term reward to be pursued, as they’re unlikely to contribute to their current sales targets any time soon.

This doesn’t mean that these suspects hold no value at all though. They just require a different approach to the hot 20% leads generated as they pose different challenges, including:

Less engaged: having only expressed a mild interest in your products or services, it’s fair to say this audience is slightly less engaged and is going to need a tenacious approach to reach them. This could mean you may need to ring 4,5 or 6 times to reach them, which just isn’t viable for a time-poor salesperson.
No immediate need: in the early stages of engagement, these suspects don’t have an immediate need, so it can be difficult for salespeople to identify where they are on the customer journey and the most appropriate course of action to take.
Lapsed time: in addition, this realistically means those 80% suspects will be pushed to the bottom of the pile. And if they’re not followed up promptly and tenaciously, there’s a good chance that they won’t remember what it was that piqued their interest and why you’re now bothering them when you do speak to them.
Language barriers: this all presupposes that you and your suspect speak the same language, which is not always the case in global organisations. If you don’t have salespeople in place who speak their language it can be even harder to nurture these suspects and promote engagement.

As a result, almost all the potential opportunities represented by those 80% suspects are going to waste.

How to maximise your ROI on generated leads

So, we’ve discussed why lead generation waste happens and the challenges that these 80% suspects pose, but now it’s time to look at how you can avoid these pitfalls and get more value from all the leads you generate, not just a small percentage.

At The Call Business, we create efficient contact strategies that qualify, engage, triage and nurture the 80% suspects that are designed to:

Qualify out the time wasters.
Engage with the viable contacts and identify the possible future opportunities.
Nurture them, keep in touch with them, make them feel valued and turn them into prospects that will flourish into clients, when it’s the right time for them.

And here’s how we do it…

We’re part of your team

We act as an extension of your team. At the outset, our business developers learn about your products, your markets, your USPs. We become familiar with your FAQs. We work to a brief not a script, so we can have natural, authentic conversations with your suspects. Working globally, with a team of native-speaking business developers in 20+ languages, we can engage your suspects regardless of their nationality.

We identify where they are on their customer journey

Using gentle qualification questioning, we can establish where each suspect is on their customer journey and the most appropriate next steps.

We recognise buying signals

Through our experience, we know that when suspects start to ask really technical questions, those are buying signals, and that is our cue to hand them over to you. Once their questions are answered, if their need isn’t immediate, you can elect to hand them back to us for nurturing or continue the dialogue yourself if you have the capacity to do so.

Our sole focus is your future pipeline

Your assigned business developers aren’t distracted by face-to-face meetings, interrupted by having to write proposals or presentations and they don’t have to deal with new clients. Our team’s focus is always and entirely on managing this pipeline of future prospects for you.

We offer flexible lead qualification resources

You can contract us for as many or as few days per month of our services as you need. And you can dial that level of service up or down without any HR issues and no arguments about headcount.

What ROI can this approach deliver?

At TCB, our lead qualification and customer nurturing is a tried-and-tested approach, meaning that our clients have benefited from extraordinary results, such as:

Our lead nurturing was directly attributed to a six-fold increase in new project value for a large scientific and medical components manufacturer.

In nine months, we engaged a pool of unqualified suspects to deliver 474 hot prospects to a market-leading gas analysis supplier.
In six months, we booked 86 meetings for a client, which generated 36 deals and enabled them to exceed their revenue target by 1000%.

When you invest in generating leads, no matter what channel you use, you need to get the maximum ROI from your investment. So, to wring every last bit of value from your investment, let’s have a quick chat to explore the options.

Because, whatever percentage of prospects you initially convert, over time with our help, this could be so much more.

Lead qualification and nurturing is not all we offer. You can see our full range of our services here or drop an email to info@thecallbusiness.com to arrange a call to discuss your needs.

Beating Sales Lead Wastage to Increase ROI