B2B Demand Generation | Driving Leads for Less

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We recently had a guest post here from Mac McIntosh of AcquireB2B (B2B Demand

Generation Expert Mac McIntosh interviewed by Find New Customers.) He had a post in a recently newsletter about how marketing can generate sales opportunities at considerably lower cost than sales that we liked. Frankly, if you are looking to develop marketing strategies for your company, listen to Mac.

It has been my belief for sometime that having salespeople work the phones and emails to generate leads was a massive waste of money. It seems that Mac agrees. For a related post see 4 Steps to Convince Your CEO That Demand Generation is a Marketing, not Sales Function. in addition, in the latest version of Inside the Mind of the B2B Buyer, it was found that only 6% of deals came from cold calls. Bottom line: If your company is relying on sales cold calls to generate leads, you’ve got a serious problem.

I’m not going to share all of Mac’s great article - just enough to give you the gist.

Most of the profitable, fast-growing companies I know don’t rely solely on the folks in sales to generate new business. Instead, these successful companies use a marketing-driven sales approach to get more sales for less.

They leverage lower cost-per-touch, one-to-many marketing tactics to address the front end of the sales pipeline: prospecting and nurturing their prospects until they are qualified as sales-ready leads. 

Then they focus their more costly one-to-one touches by salespeople on the later steps of the prospects’ buying process: the heavy lifting of doing demos, crafting proposals and closing sales.

A marketing-driven approach to B2B sales makes dollars and sense.  

So instead of adding more salespeople to knock on more doors, use marketing to cost-effectively contact your prospects and fill the sales pipeline with qualified leads. Doing so will result in more sales-ready opportunities that your salespeople can turn into new business, meaning more sales, revenue and profits for your company.

Mac’s point is that Marketing has the ability to generate high quality leads at far lower cost, resulting in more profits for you. Not only does marketing generate leads for 32% lower costs (his numbers) but freeing up sales to have more high quality meetings with prospects is invaluable.

Thanks Mac. I wanted to post the permalink to your article, but I could not find it.

What do you think? Do you agree that more companies need to move the bulk of B2B demand generation back to Marketing?

“If more companies listened to (Find New Customers) a lot more would be sold.” Dan McDade, Pointclear.