What’s Your Go-To Lead Source?

“You can’t coach speed” is a quote often associated with college football. It refers to teams who win primarily because of speedy players at the skilled positions, usually the wide receivers. Unlike the NFL where everyone’s fast, quick college receivers have a distinct advantage over their slower opponents. Even coaches who aren’t proven winners know to design passing plays to take advantage of their fastest receivers.

The strategies that college coaches use to exploit speed are similar to your lead generation programs, especially when you analyze the quality of your leads from specific lead sources, as well as the quantity. Modern CRM systems along with marketing automation solutions have enabled you to track the quantity of your leads by source for many years. However, it’s important for you not to rely solely on these numbers.

To illustrate this, let’s review an example. A software company that sells a customer service application to corporate call centers targets vice presidents of customer service as the main buyers. The vendor conducts a range of marketing activities to generate leads, including telesales, email marketing, trade shows and webinars. The activities yield data, providing metrics that help the vendor determine their effectiveness. Based on the data, the vendor learned that 50% of the total number of leads generated came from webinars, while only 20% came from trade shows.

At first glance it may appear that the vendor should invest more in webinars, as it could be the go-to lead source. However, let’s also analyze the lead quality by lead source. Upon further review, the vendor learned that trade show leads progressed through the buying cycle faster than webinar leads, becoming marketing qualified leads (MQLs) three months faster. With a typical buying cycle of nine months, the vendor would close new deals from trade show leads faster than webinar leads.

Additionally, the analysis revealed that while email marketing only generated 5% of the total leads, those leads were highly qualified and closed as sales even faster than trade show leads.

Overall, it’s critical for you to understand your lead sources well, including both the quantity and quality of those leads. The vendor in the example now knows that email marketing could be the speedy receiver that scores quickly and should invest more effort through that channel. The vendor also shouldn’t abandon webinars because they do drive a good amount of leads, but it should analyze why webinars don’t drive as many quality leads and make adjustments to improve the effectiveness of that lead source as well. Lead generation is dynamic and needs constant tweaking.

Do you have a go-to lead source? If not, then please contact us, and we can help you determine yours.