Does Your Marketing Team Generate Good Leads?

The other day, I wrote a blog post, which will never see the light of day. It was a rant in the purest form of the word "rant" about how most b2b marketing managers don't really care about the future of their company.

Yes. That's too extreme. 

But, as a salesperson who sells marketing software to marketers , it's pretty frustrating to me that most marketing managers do NOT have a pipeline of leads for their sales team. It's super frustrating for me when they aren't prepared to change the way they do things so they can fix this problem. Or when they don't actually think this is a problem. 

I was checking out our backlinks today and saw a few posts from BNET's Sales Machine blog . I realize I'm not alone in my frustrations, as you can see from their headlines:

• How Branding Can Kill Your Profit
• Do your Marketers Produce Good Leads? 
• How to Align Marketing And Sales.

The post that particularly struck a chord was the one about whether marketers produce good leads. Here's the highlight that struck me:

Jim Dickie of CSO Insights , speaking at the recent Sales 2.0 Conference , revealed the results of a survey of 600 sales and marketing groups. According to that research, the marketers think they produce 38 percent of the leads that actually turn into customers. Not surprisingly, sales pros think the number is smaller - only 23 percent. 

At HubSpot, atleast 95% of our leads are generated by marketing while the rest is referred by customers. A small % are referred from our new partner program with marketing agencies . 

I actually think - based on my experience talking to 1,000+ marketers in the last 1.5 years - that both of the numbers from CSO Insight's study are too high.

HubSpot is not in the norm. Most marketing managers that I speak with are NOT generating many leads for their sales team through online marketing.

The more shocking thing is that most companies don't even know whether their marketing team generates good leads:

Depressingly, there's no way to tell, because, according to Jim, most companies don't track leads through the sales funnel.

Yes, it's true.

After investing thousands, and in many cases millions, of dollars in CRM, most companies can't tell you if their marketing group is providing leads that end up producing business.

We know our referring source to visitor to lead to customer conversion stats because we do closed loop marketing .

Do you know your company's stats? What % of your company's leads were generated from marketing? What % of those turn into clients?

Photo:  rickz  

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