B2B Lead Quality Ledger

You might start to struggle finding new customers despite having an impressive number of leads from your marketing campaign. This will soon become apparent.

Some prospective customers may not be within your service area, lack the correct budget, misunderstand your offer, or are just researching. You may have a few good leads but they are lost amongst the incorrect ones.

Businesses offering specialist services will quickly come across some issues.

Having a low cost per click or lead may look great however you won’t know if you’re gaining any real value for your business.

Effective advertising for B2B businesses (particularly in the financial, technology, consulting and other specialist industries) requires tighter integration between your marketing spend and sales.

Understanding what happens after a click

Why you may be getting misleading lead volumes

Imagine you have a business offering specialised financial solutions for purchasing commercial equipment.

Your marketing team create a campaign promoting an article around funding options for growing businesses. Your campaign receives lots of traffic and many people fill out the enquiry form.

Whilst this looks great,

when passed onto your sales team you may notice many of your leads are asking for personal loans, seeking amounts outside your preferred range or requesting financial products you do not offer.

Whilst you have created interest, you may not be receiving much of the interest you require.

Marketing and Sales teams may have different ideas on what success looks like.

Marketing teams may track the number of clicks, impressions and submissions they receive. Sales tend to focus on whether they have leads with realistic potential.

Whilst this isn’t inherently bad, if you are considering your leads to be qualified opportunities before considering whether they fit your criteria you may be missing out.

By knowing what kind of leads you want to receive beforehand,

you can ensure your finance business is only attracting the right kind of leads. For example:

Type of business

Location

Approximate size of transaction

Reason for financing

Or if you have a software business:

Size of company

Existing systems

Authorised to purchase

Implementation requirements

Once you have an understanding of what you want, you’ll be able to better assess how your advertising is performing.

The aim isn’t to get as many leads as possible, but you want to attract the right people for your business.

Define what a qualified enquiry looks like

One of the most useful things you can do is agree with your sales team what a good enquiry looks like before you even design your advertising.

You want to be specific with your criteria so you’re being consistent with your decisions however you don’t want to be too strict and miss out on good leads.

Your business could have multiple stages:

Initial enquiry – Someone has shown interest.

Marketing qualified lead – The lead fits basic criteria around your target audience.

Sales accepted lead – The lead has been reviewed and accepted.

Qualified opportunity – The lead could be a viable transaction/purchase.

However, this will only be useful if your organisation are all on the same page.

For example, if you’re an advisory business offering project finance, you may receive an enquiry from a company looking to develop some infrastructure.

Whilst they may be in the right industry, you may need to understand more about the project to know if they fit your service.

You may need to know what stage of the project they’re in, how they want to finance it, where they’re based and how much documentation they have to know if this is a lead worth talking to in detail.

Whilst you can’t know everything about the lead from your advertising, it’s important to know what your sales/professional team can do.

However, your marketing can help you have a good conversation with your lead by being clear on what they qualify for.

By having content on your landing page outlining what type of customer you want, you can help those who aren’t a good fit realise they’re not a good fit.

You may see less form fills but you’ll have a higher percentage of good leads.

This can be a good compromise if you have a costly Sales Process.

Know how much you’re spending on real leads

Traditional advertising reports will often focus on lead cost as it’s easy to calculate.

Take your spend divided by the number of leads and you’ll have a good baseline.

However, this doesn’t take into account the quality of your leads.

Let’s say you have 2 campaigns:

Campaign A: 1,000 clicks. Avg cost per click $0.80. Total spend: $800. 60 leads.

Cost per lead: ~$13.33.

Campaign B: 1,000 clicks. Avg cost per click $1.50. Total spend: $1,500. 40 leads.

Cost per lead: $37.50.

Campaign A looks like it’s performing much better.

However, when passed onto sales you may only have 8 leads that fit the criteria you’ve set. Campaign B has 20 sales accepted leads.

Campaign A now has a cost per sales accepted lead of $100. Campaign B has a cost per sales accepted lead of $75.

Despite being more expensive per click and having fewer leads, you have a much cheaper cost per viable contact.

This is just an example and the numbers will vary depending on your industry, offer, target audience and campaign. However this shows you shouldn’t base your budget decisions on what looks like the cheapest metric.

A more useful metric would be:

Cost per sales accepted lead = Total spend / Number of leads accepted by sales.

Although you still need to assess this further as not all leads will turn into customers and different customers can bring in very different amounts of revenue.

However, this shows you’re connecting your spend to something closer to what you want.

Understand the Difference Between Demand Creation and capture

Not everyone who could become a valuable customer will be actively looking for a provider.

The business owner may know they’ll need financing for their expansion however may not know what financing structures would be suitable.

Or a company may be struggling with an old software system however won’t start looking for quotes until they realise they have a problem.

This means you have different scenarios for your advertising.

Demand capture – This will be for those showing intent to purchase. Often search advertising will be a good option as people will be showing their interest through their search.

Demand creation – This will help provide useful information to those who may have a relevant issue but aren’t comparing providers.

Both can help with customer acquisition however you’ll likely have different messaging.

Your search ad will likely be quite specific to your needs.

Your content ad may provide some helpful information to help them understand their needs.

For example, if you sell commercial equipment you could write an article around what to consider when replacing machinery.

This may include information around maintenance costs, how much they’ll be using it, disruption during implementation and what the financial implications are of buying vs leasing.

Those interested in these questions may become more informed leads over time.

However, you wouldn’t want your content to suggest they all need financing or that any financing structure will be suitable.

The aim of your ad is to introduce them to a relevant topic. The aim of your article is to help them understand.

Only those with a genuine reason to look into your offer should have a commercial enquiry.

Use native advertising at the Right Stage

Content campaigns should use an advertising format that allows them to discover more. Native advertising can be a good option as it blends in with the rest of the website.

This can be a good way to provide educational content, industry information and buying guides for your B2B audience.

You should ensure those seeing your ad are directed to relevant and accurate information. If you’re promoting an article around financing for operations you shouldn’t suddenly send them to an aggressive enquiry form.

When considering a native ad platform think about what pricing model they have, how your advertising will look and if it suits your content.

Galaksion offers native advertising spots that blend in with publisher websites. They also offer cost per click and cost per thousand impressions.

With a CPC model you’ll pay for every click. With a CPM model you’ll pay depending on how many impressions you receive.

This will affect how you plan your spend however won’t guarantee you will receive qualified leads.

You’ll still need to consider the audience available, campaign settings, cost of your advertising and how your content is performing.

If you’re offering a specialist B2B service you’ll also need to consider if the traffic and advertising policies available are suitable for your offer.

Content cannot overcome an unsuitable audience or incorrect proposition.

Native advertising should be clearly identifiable as advertising.

Create landing pages around commercial decisions

Often a lot of work goes into designing your advertising however not enough thought goes into what your audience will see once they click through.

Your landing page for your B2B service should go beyond just repeating your headline.

If you offer a procurement consultancy service you could have a page explaining what kind of organisations you work with, what procurement issues you solve, what information they’ll need to provide for an initial assessment and what will happen next.

Whilst this may not be as exciting as making big promises around transforming their business, it will answer questions to help them decide if they’re a good fit.

This also applies to financial services.

If you offer advisory services you should be clear on whether you’re arranging/advocating for transactions or providing funding. Don’t suggest they’ll get guaranteed approvals, certain terms or a successful transaction.

Having clear explanations will help prevent confusion for potential customers and help your sales team identify relevant opportunities.

Your landing page can also help with different levels of buyer readiness.

Those doing research on a complex decision may prefer to read through a detailed guide. Those who understand your service may want to fill out an enquiry. Providing useful information for both will create a more cohesive experience.

You don’t want to make it as hard as possible to fill out the form. You want to provide enough information for them to decide if they should contact you.

Consider your Sales Process

The performance of your advertising doesn’t stop at the form being filled in. How quickly and well you respond can have a big impact on whether you turn your genuine enquiry into a business opportunity.

Imagine 2 businesses receive the same number of relevant leads.

The first has a clear process in place to route the enquiry to the correct team, log the status and follow up.

The second sends the enquiry to a general inbox. This may cause delays and the enquiry may not go to the correct person.

Despite the advertising campaigns performing the same you may get different results.

This is why it’s important for your marketing team to understand what happens once your lead comes into the business.

Ask useful questions such as how quickly are enquiries being responded to, who is deciding if they’re a good fit and what information do they need before an initial consultation.

You should also log why opportunities aren’t progressing.

They may not have the correct budget, require a different service, be outside of your geographical market or just not be ready.

This can be important.

If your enquiries are consistently not fitting your criteria you may need to adjust your message or targeting.

If genuine leads are not being responded to in a timely manner you may have an issue with your Sales Process.

Without this visibility you risk increasing your marketing spend to compensate for other issues.

Set budgets based on realistic value

How much you can spend on acquiring an opportunity will depend on more than just how much revenue they could bring in.

You’ll need to consider how much it will cost to deliver, manage the account, how much time it will take to sell and how likely you are to win the transaction.

Let’s say you offer a specialist B2B service and estimate you’ll make $8,000 contribution from each new customer (after direct delivery costs). If roughly 1 in 8 of your sales accepted leads turn into customers then each sales accepted lead will bring in an expected contribution of $1,000 (before any acquisition or sales processing).

However you’ll still need to consider how much time your staff will take, how many enquiries won’t convert, overheads and how accurate your estimation is.

If it costs around $200 of your internal resources to handle each sales accepted lead you’ll need to consider this when deciding how much you can realistically spend.

The exact calculation will vary between businesses. Particularly if you’re receiving revenue over a period of months and maintaining a relationship with your customer for years.

You should also avoid thinking of your projected lifetime value as guaranteed cash you can spend on your marketing.

Whilst your campaign may look profitable in the long term it could cause cashflow issues in the short term.

For organisations with a long B2B sales cycle, it’s important to distinguish expected future revenue from cash already received.

A sensible marketing budget should take into consideration realistic contribution margins, conversion likelihood and how much you can afford to spend on acquiring customers whilst deals are still outstanding.

Use feedback from sales to improve your Next Campaign

A useful way to review your campaign should include more than just your marketing dashboards.

Often your sales team will have useful information to help understand why some of your enquiries are progressing and some aren’t.

They may realise that a particular article is attracting smaller businesses who aren’t the target audience for your service.

Or your leads from the educational guide may take longer to get in touch however have a better understanding of your service.

A practical way to review is to look at your original advert, landing page, number of enquiries, sales accepted rate and why they weren’t a good fit.

If possible track how many of your accepted leads turn into genuine opportunities and customers.

Consider timing.

A high value B2B service may have a lengthy sales cycle. If you’ve run your campaign recently you shouldn’t expect to see immediate revenue. However you shouldn’t let a long sales cycle be an excuse for poor early indicators.

If your advert is consistently attracting people looking for services you don’t offer this is useful information.

Your next test could be to narrow down your audience, change what your article is focussing on or make it clearer what they qualify for on your landing page.

By only changing 1 major factor you’ll be able to see what’s happening.

The aim is to understand what messaging is attracting the right businesses for you.