Great insights from a recent Frost and Sullivan survey called the Executive Benchmark Assessment. Ardath Albee has a great post about it entitled “Is What You Don’t Know Tanking Your Marketing Efforts?“

Are any of these challenges facing your business in 2011? Are you struggling to implement your own lead generation programs? Do your sales teams complain about the quality of your sales leads?

In this survey, they spoke with over 350 marketers try to do lead generation marketing. Particularly now, lead generation marketing in a downturn economy is critical. Here’s what they found:

Strategy and alignment is about creating a clear, common set of objectives. Many organizations have heard the call and attempted to move toward better communication, including and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between sales and marketing that spell out key agreements such as how high-quality sales leads are defined. Nonetheless:

• Less than one-quarter of BtoB marketers say they’re generating enough demand to satisfy their sales teams. (More than 3 out of four are not generating enough sales leads.)
• Less than half (46%) have developed buyer personas to guide communications and sales readiness for their prospects. (More than half are using Ready, Fire, Aim.)
• Slightly below two-thirds, 64%, have defined the stages of the pipeline in order to ensure marketing and sales agree on common definitions.

Technology is the engine that enables best practices demand-generation tactics such as lead nurturing and lead scoring as well as the integration of multiple programs. The survey found more than half (52%) of marketers use some sort of marketing automation platform. This is a higher rate of adoption than found in other research, accounting for the relative sophistication of the survey group. However, although lead nurturing and message testing are both proven to increase efficacy of online marketing programs:

• Only 33% have an effective lead nurturing process.
• Only 36% leverage marketing automation or manual processes for message testing.

Bottom line: Most companies don’t have deep buyer personas, nor have they defined the stages of the buying process. This means most are unable to create effective lead nurturing campaigns and finally most don’t generate enough demand to satisfy sales teams. As a result, salespeople are crying out for quality sales leads.

“Business to business lead generation is a complex and confusing process, using many parts and processes.  The fundamental key to successful b2b lead generation is doing the base level processes correctly, like creating buyer personas and universal lead definitions. I believe business is a lot like sports. If NBA players can improve free throw shooting by going back to fundamentals, so can businesses.” says Jeff Ogden, President of the B2B sales lead generation company Find New Customers.

If you want to do sales lead generation, you’ll need to learn how to create buyer personas, universal lead definition and map buying processes. To do this, we suggest you download our popular white paper, How To Find New Customers and visit our Education page.

What do you think? We love comments and people who share.

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.” Find New Customers is one of few lead generation companies in New York.

Find New Customers helps companies like yours (with 50 to 5,000 employees and complex products) implement lead generation programs to improve the way you find and acquire high quality sales leads using best practices in online lead generation. Quality leads matter. In fact, a recent study found that sales teams with fewer, high quality sales leads closed more than sales teams with more leads of dubious quality.

If you are looking to do sales lead generation online, contact the B2B lead generation experts at Find New Customers, please use the form below.