At the end of 2016, a new Demand Gen Report on B2B lead generation (“The Campaign Confidence Gap”) took a closer look at the B2B lead generation process. While the report was obviously advancing a certain perspective – that companies should be experimenting with interactive content if they want to improve their business leads – there were 3 statistics that really stood out and are worth exploring further.
41% of B2B marketers mentioned “new sources of leads” as their top challenge
Easily the biggest perceived challenge facing B2B marketers was bringing in new sources of leads. This makes sense, given that most marketers view sales as simply a numbers game – if you bring in more leads, you’ll get more sales. But that raises the whole “quality vs. quantity” problem.
What needs to happen is some sort of differentiation between “leads” and “hot leads” to reflect the fact that quality matters. This leads to the following question; What’s better – 100 “hot leads” or 1000 “leads”? Depends on who you’re asking, of course. For the B2B sales team, they’d much rather have the “hot leads.” Why waste their time on leads that may or may not convert into sales? However, for the B2B marketing team, the preference seems to be getting as many “leads” as possible, as proof that they’re doing their job.
33% of B2B marketers mentioned “developing compelling calls-to-action” as their top challenge
In short, nearly one in three B2B marketers are having trouble putting together the right message to get their prospects to respond. That suggests, in part, that they just don’t have enough data to make the right decision. They might not know who their typical buyers are, what the typical B2B buyer journey looks like, or what is causing bottlenecks in the B2B customer experience. Without deeper insights into these factors, it’s hard to create a compelling CTA.
Only 18% of B2B marketers are “very confident” in the effectiveness of their B2B lead generation campaigns
The problem is that the very architecture of the web appears to be shifting, and B2B marketers are having a hard time keeping up. In the “old days” things like webinars, whitepapers and cold calls were what resulted in the best leads. Now, it’s all about email, social media and content marketing. And the next cycle seems to favor what “The Campaign Confidence Gap” refers to as “interactive content” – video, surveys, infographics, ROI calculators and online assessments. In short, content that forces prospects to interact with it.
These three statistics help to highlight three big issues with today’s approach to B2B lead generation – the focus on quantity over quality, the inability to take feedback from the B2B sales team to improve the B2B marketing process, and the difficult race to keep up with new behaviors on the web.
Maybe it’s time to take a step back and re-think what makes an effective lead generation process. Should we think of it as a funnel, as a pipeline or as a journey? And does the changing architecture of the web mean that B2B marketers should make lead generation about more than just the numbers? Being able to answer those questions matter for B2B marketers hoping to grow their leads.
IMAGE: Designed by Freepik
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.