How is your sales team spending their time? Recent findings by CSO Insights reveal key areas where B2B companies can enhance their marketing efforts and increase sales. In a survey for CSO’s Sales Performance Optimization Report, 1,800 companies reported that their sales representatives spend nearly 20 percent of their time generating leads.
Obviously this is not the most effective use of a sales agent’s valuable time and skills. Unfortunately, however, this has become standard practice in many businesses. This is not surprising in light of the findings in Marketing Sherpa’s 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.
Out of 935 respondents, an astonishing 80 percent admitted to sending unqualified leads on to their sales team.
Still, customer acquisition was found to be an even higher priority this year than in previous years, with over 90 percent of marketers in the CSO report stating that acquiring new customers has become their top priority.
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Other activities that typically consume a sales agent’s time include attending meetings and handling administrative tasks (18%), account service calls, (15.2%) and other activities such as travel and training (36.6%), leaving only 11.5 percent of the average salesperson’s workday for closing sales.
How can businesses dealing with these challenges keep their pipelines filled with qualified leads? Many companies are creating a balance by purchasing pre-qualified leads so that their sales team can spend more time closing and less time trying to generate and qualify new leads. Even if such a move produced a conservative 10 percent increase in sales productivity, the potential for much greater revenue is obvious.
Supplementing your marketing strategy by purchasing qualified leads will also free your sales team to spend more time nurturing those leads that fail to close on the first call. When you consider that for every 100 raw leads, only 4 to 7 are ready to buy, it’s easy to see how businesses can further improve ROI by shifting their sales teams’ focus toward nurturing the other 93 to 96 percent of leads throughout the buying cycle.
It seems you can’t go online, turn on the television, or even step outside without being bombarded with advertising by companies desperately trying to convince you of their superiority. Most people, however, are so accustomed to these ads, they simply tune them out. Which is bad news for the B2B marketers who are still spending much of their budget on these outbound lead generation methods.
Ideally, in order to achieve real growth in your business, you should maintain a steady stream of premium, real-time leads. In reality, however, there may be times when budget considerations or lack of sales staff compel you to look for ways to ‘fill in the gaps’ between premium lead purchases.
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