Table of Contents
What works when it comes to B2B lead generating is the following:
This post aims to deconstruct the most important B2B techniques and examine some of the most successful methods of generating leads.
Nonetheless, before we get into particular instances and techniques, you must establish the proper foundations and solve any difficulties in your marketing.
How to Calculate B2B Lead Conversion Rate?
When you have determined the conversions, you need to measure, calculating the B2B lead conversion rate is a simple process.
If you are still in the stone age without a formal website, as long as you keep track of the number of leads you get and the number of sales you close, you should be OK (conversion). You may figure out your B2B conversion rate by doing the following…
B2B Conversion Rate = Total number of Deals/Total Number of Leads * 100
If you are measuring conversions from website leads, your formula is as follows:
B2B Conversion Rate = Total Number of Deals/Number of Visitors * 100
Example: If you closed 30 sales in a month and had 3,000 unique visits to your website, your B2B Conversion Rate would be 1%.
Which B2B Lead Conversion Tracking Methods are Effective?
The problem is that many business owners are unsure of where to begin when promoting their company and tracking the results of their marketing efforts. As a result, they start experimenting with various options with no knowledge of the actual return on their investment.
As a business owner, you do not need to be a professional marketer to succeed. Nonetheless, knowing several critical statistics about your company’s sales funnel may help you coordinate your marketing efforts more effectively without wasting your money on marketing that doesn’t provide a return on your investment.
The Process of Generating B2B Leads
Learning how to generate leads is just a portion of the whole process.
A rigorous lead-generating strategy will be required if your company is serious about growing its revenue. Processes bring together marketing and sales teams and provide salespeople with a tried-and-true structure to follow.
Lead generation refers to how sales and marketing teams convert prospects into paying clients in the business-to-business world. But what exactly do these procedures entail?
Step 1: Identify B2B prospects
To generate B2B leads, the first step is to identify and collect the contact information of prospective buyers. (Fortunately, that’s exactly what we’ll be discussing.)
A company’s contact information is often obtained internally, developed by a third-party “lead gen” firm, or purchased from a lead database (not advisable for B2B lead generation).
Step 2: Making contact with potential leads
Following creating a list of (hopefully) high-quality leads, sales representatives contact leads via cold outreach, social media, or by responding to queries.
Step 3: Identifying and qualifying high-quality leads
While dealing with leads, representatives assess the likelihood that the leads will make a purchase.
They’ll achieve this by determining where leads are in the purchase process at the assessment time. These phases are as follows:
- Customer research and awareness: The customer has become aware of a solution they need or an issue they are experiencing, and they are beginning to learn more about it. Blogs, whitepapers, and case studies are examples of the material they will read during the awareness stage.
- Consideration: The lead understands precisely what they want. They’ll outline their exact requirements before doing research and “opening up” to potential providers. After selecting the suppliers who best match their needs, the buyer will have many meetings and check-ins with other decision-makers to finalize a transaction.
Following the stage of a lead’s development, representatives will either launch nurturing efforts or work on convincing the prospect to schedule a call or demo.
Step 4: Close leads by completing a transaction.
Success! After many meetings with other suppliers, the prospect chooses you, and the transaction is completed successfully. They will now be moved to customer success to complete the onboarding process. Woot!
B2B Lead Conversion Tracking Methods
Lifecycle Stages
Every B2B firm is distinct from the others. The majority of the time, your funnel is specific as well, which makes it even more critical to explicitly identify the lifecycle phases of your leads depending on the interactions they’ve had with your company (not only for marketing purposes but for tracking as well).
For example, how you connect with and measure leads who have a contract in hand should be pretty different from how you communicate with and measure leads who have downloaded an eBook. Lead conversion tracking is built on the foundation of understanding the lifecycle phases.
For example, here’s one approach to categorize your phases of lifecycle development, from consciousness to enlightenment:
- Subscriber: Individuals who have read some of your blog material and have decided to receive communication from you through one of your numerous email sign-up tactics. They may not be aware of what you offer or do, but they find your material to be of value.
- Lead: Those who have shown an interest in a broad, top-of-the-funnel offer.
- Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): Those who have submitted thorough information such as firm name, job title, and so on to obtain gated material (depending on your form fields) such as whitepapers, data studies, and so on.
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): Those who have shown an interest in your product or service by seeking a live demonstration.
- Deal: Real sales possibilities where their firm and yours look to be a good fit.
- Customer: Anyone who has a currently closed-won deal on their hands.
- Evangelist: Dedicated supporters of your company who bring up your brand in discussions and material.
When delineating your lifecycle phases, please make sure that they are recorded, understood by all parties involved, and consistent. Once you’ve specified your lifecycle phases, you can start tracking the number of leads you have of each category, as well as the conversion rates connected with each type of lead.
Source and Cost Attribution
In an ideal world, your analytics and CRM are set up in such a manner that it is simple to see where and when leads are generated. Knowing the source (or channel) of a campaign’s leads and the breakdown (by month) of how those leads were created are critical to assessing campaign performance from multiple sources. Success is equal to the sum of traffic times conversion rate.
It is possible to represent the number of leads generated. The amount of money spent in each channel as follows (we divide the cost of content creation into thirds across Direct, Referral, and Organic because it affects each): Knowing which channels generated your leads and how much money was spent in each channel can be represented as follows:
If you are looking at cost-effectiveness, it is equally crucial to match up the dollars spent with the month in which the leads were created to determine the cost-efficiency of your lead sources. Each source will have a different quantity of leads and accompanying pricing to compare, so be sure to do your research. Also possible is to prioritize what needs improving next, assist where you should double-down, and educate what needs to be eliminated.
Goal Ramp Incorporation
When it comes to running a successful business, setting goals is essential. So why not include them in your lead conversion monitoring data? Then, everyone engaged will quickly assess how well the team is doing concerning the objectives set. As an example, consider the following SQL target ramp, which rises by 10% every month:
As you can see, the overall number of SQLs in February surpassed the objective for the month by 35, or around 6 percent. To implement an “actual number concerning target number %” like this, the following formula should be used: (Actual – Goal) / (Actual – Goal) This is beneficial for whatever marketing objectives you may have, such as revenue generation, other lifecycle phases, and so on.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (per SQL)
When we begin to tie in income earned from marketing, we may present higher-quality leads due to the higher-quality revenue created from marketing. Quality always wins out over quantity, just as it does with substance.
Keeping in mind the SQL actuals contrasted to the target example from #3, Our performance throughout December was below expectations. However, look at the monthly recurring revenue (MRR) produced by qualified sales leads that started in December. You’ll discover that it is larger than the previous month, showing that the quality of the leads has increased since the last month. MRR per SQL is equal to MRR divided by the total number of SQLs.
Seeing your monthly recurring income per SQL growing higher for your organization is more satisfying than exceeding your lead quantity targets.
Months to Payback
This metric also considers the value of new customers gained as a result of leads, and it is my favorite way to measure marketing effectiveness. The months to payback ratio is similar to the CLTV/CAC ratio in that it directly connects to how quickly your SaaS firm can expand.
Because it counts the number of months of new MRR created that month that is necessary to pay “payback” the dollars invested in marketing to get the leads, you want to see this figure trending lower for your organization.
The lower the figure, the sooner the company begins to generate profits. Anything in the 2 to a 3-month range or below is perfect for fast development, mainly if you offer yearly contracts.
Multiple views of the above data
Create a couple of Excel sheets to monitor and show all of the B2B lead conversion data listed above. For example:
Each month, your sources data is sent onto a monthly/master sheet that you maintain.
A weekly piece of paper is also beneficial. It’s important to remember that the longer you’ve been monitoring lead conversions in this manner, the longer it will take to update the data each time since we were crediting revenue and lifecycle stage progression to past months when the leads were generated.
The last stage is to distribute the information to all of the parties concerned. Take them through all of the components and point out the essential areas they should pay attention to.
Imposing Higher Standards
According to a BrightTALK current trends analysis, 68 percent of marketers believe improving lead quality is their most pressing necessity. However, if you want to see results, you must combine sales and marketing efforts:
- What are the distinctions between advertising qualified leads, deals qualified leads, and sales recognized leads, and how do they differ?
- Would you describe a “sales-ready” lead in your own words? What acts and criteria suggest that you are expecting something?)
- Who is in charge of overseeing the quality assurance procedure?
Marketers need to establish more outstanding capacity criteria since they often struggle to demonstrate return on investment (ROI) and increase their commitment to revenue.
Use a B2B Lead Scoring Model
A lead score system is an excellent method for evaluating and scaling your attention to essentials and opportunities. The lead scoring system provides a numerical score to each lead based on the firmographic information obtained throughout the lead collection process. When a lead reaches a specified numerical limit, it is sent to the deals department for further development.
The blame for poor lead conversion rates is sometimes placed on advertisements by consumers themselves. Sales representatives, on the other hand, have a few responsibilities to claim. One of the most difficult is catching up with the leaders. The speed with which they follow up and how they conduct the dialogue may significantly impact whether or not a lead converts.
Execute Data Verification
More than 40% of all B2B leads suffer from the negative consequences of poor information quality, which manifests itself in missing structure fields, copied material, improper organization, stalled email acceptance, and a variety of other difficulties. Using a database of erroneous lead profiles will make it impossible to interact with leads, much alone making future modifications to their scores. Lead conversion initiatives might suffer from a variety of negative repercussions as a result of this, including the following:
- Problems with on-time delivery
- Personalization went wrong
- Lead scoring that is problematic
Visibility
The visibility of your website reflects how probable it is that a prospective consumer will visit it. Many businesses depend on organic traffic analytics, and although such figures are significant, they aren’t the only ones that firms should consider. For example, traffic can be branded—that is, to originate from a search for the company’s name—and Google treats both branded and non-branded traffic as one.
As a result, whether a searcher consciously put your company’s name into the search box or got on your site due to a valued organic search phrase suggesting no prior awareness of your company, all organic traffic is recorded in Google Analytics.
Because of this fact, relying just on organic traffic to determine visibility is problematic.
The company’s search engine rankings for commercially important terms are a more accurate indicator of its performance.
These keywords imply a high possibility that an entirely new lead will come to your company’s website while seeking a solution to their problem.
For example, if a company sells client retention software, it would want to rank for phrases such as “customer success platform” or “customer success software,” which both suggest that a potential customer is near the purchase stage in their research.
The following are the visibility measures that our most successful corporate customers employ:
- Ranks for keywords with high transactional intent – Depending on the search intent of the people that enter the keywords into Google, all keyword phrases may be rated on a scale of transactional intent. For example, highly transactional keywords imply that the user is on the verge of making a purchase. Supply, consultancy, provider, solutions, and services are examples of terms that might be used in this context.
- Featured snippets for high-value keywords — Google’s “featured snippets,” which appear at the top of search results pages, give users quick, digestible solutions to their questions. Obtaining one of these highly sought-after positions provides a chance to get an advantage over rivals, improve traffic to the site, and eventually increase conversions. For example, having a website included in one of Google’s featured snippet boxes, typically placed at the top of the page or in the upper right sidebar, may more than double a site’s click-through rate by 50%.
- Increases in year-over-year branded traffic and referral traffic – Branded traffic is any search phrase that contains the business name or a trademarked product. Referral traffic is any search term that includes the company name or a trademarked product. This kind of traffic suggests that a searcher is acquainted with the brand and intrigued about what it has to offer or that the searcher desires to keep in touch with the brand in general (via reading company news or the blog). As a result, these visitors have a 3.5x greater chance of converting into SQLs.
It is critical for your marketing staff to keep Google’s algorithm ranking elements in mind at all times while upgrading your website following B2B SEO best practices.
Following the successful acquisition of relevant traffic to your website, evaluating your users’ engagement can assist you in identifying the weak places in your website’s conversion funnel.
Engagement
Genuine involvement is a critical component of B2B lead generating efforts. Having many visitors is only beneficial if it results in a corresponding rise in the number of quality leads generated by your website.
You should check with your marketing department to ensure that your website reaches the appropriate target, moving visitors through a conversion funnel, and finally, completing purchases and earning you a return on your investment.
The following are the most effective methods of determining engagement:
- Time on Page – A high time on page average indicates that the information on your website is well written, fascinating, and honestly delivers answers to the issues that your visitors are experiencing. For B2B websites, the average time spent on-site is just approximately 2-3 minutes, but I’ve discovered that aiming for 4-5 minutes yields much better results.
- Conversion Rate – The conversion rate measure may be used for any desired activity, such as filling out a contact form, subscribing to a newsletter, or the most apparent action of contacting your business. For “non-contact” conversions, the average landing page conversion rate is 2.35 percent across all sectors, while the average conversion rate for “contact” conversions is a mere 1.5 percent. As a result, a percentage point or two over those norms is considered an appropriate B2B conversion rate benchmark, in my opinion. There are a variety of other objectives to consider, like “getting at least ten conversions every month” and “achieving a cost-per-acquisition that is 10 percent below the industry average.”
- Bounce Rate — A “bounce” is a one-and-done occurrence in which a searcher views your site but does not return within 30 minutes to read another page, click a CTA, or otherwise engage with it. For anything other than blogs, news blurbs, and event sites, an “above average” bounce rate should be in the range of 26 to 40%; a bounce rate of more than 70% is considered unsatisfactory. High bounce rates suggest that the page isn’t what the searcher was searching for and that the page type isn’t well matched to the term searched for.
Knowing which metrics to follow is one thing; however, organizations also want dependable tools to track and measure those indicators. So, in the next part, I’ll go through a couple of our preferred platforms and applications.
Final Thoughts
You will get information on conversions for your keywords, advertising, and campaigns after implementing lead conversion monitoring mechanisms. Knowing that you have this information in your reports may assist you in understanding how your marketing contributes to the achievement of critical business goals.
