TLDR: Every marketing team should make a concentrated effort on acquiring, nurturing and converting leads – but qualify contacts as passive or active based on their buying intent before involving the sales team. Obsess over your infrastructure, ability to create and deliver value, and processes for the best chances of success.
Over the last few years, there has been a growing discontentment in B2B marketing circles around the idea of ‘collecting leads’. And I get it.
You spend countless hours and dollars deploying a strategy with the focus of building a huge list of potential customer names that end up with a <0.5% conversion rate.
Sales get angry.
Leadership loses trust.
You feel shit.
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As an alternative, a growing number of marketing professionals advise doing away with the whole concept of collecting and qualifying leads. Instead, focus on generating demand and the business will come.
For me, they are two sides of the same coin. You generate demand to collect leads… or a database or an audience or a community, whatever you want to call it.
Boil it down and they’re all the same thing – owned contacts.
Assuming each new contact in your CRM is ready to buy from you is foolish. Research suggests that up to 95% of all target accounts in your market are out-of-market.
Yet this is what most companies do believe.
“Yo, this person filled out a form – start warming up the contract, Diane!” ⬅️ actual quote.
The problem with ‘collecting leads’ only emerges when all new contacts are handed over to sales as soon as they’re collected – whether the intent to buy is there or not – and people waste their time chasing shadows.
Instead, marketers need to qualify their database on buying intent, not just customer or engagement fit, and be more intentional on when to loop in sales.
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I categorise leads into two buckets.
> Passive. Contact that has signalled an interest in what you have to say to the point of handing over contact details but has no immediate need for purchase.
> Active. Contact has explicitly signalled a need to evaluate your product or service to solve an immediate challenge.
Spending time and energy on capturing, growing and nurturing the first group is a worthwhile endeavour – particularly across long sales cycles – and as such should be measured and rewarded. After all, the more passive leads in your possession, the better equipped you are to nurture that contact over the long term and be top-of-mind when that contact is ready to buy – at which point, it’s time to bring in the sales cavalry.
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So, should you be building strategies to acquire, nurture and convert leads? 100% yes – especially in industries with long and complex sales cycles outside of SaaS.
Here’s how it should look.
Generate demand (through social, content, community, et al.)
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Capture demand (in the form of leads)
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Qualify leads (passive vs. active)
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Nurture each group accordingly
OK, but how do we collect leads?
It breaks down into three main areas.
👉 Infrastructure
Without a solid technological foundation built to measure and capture intent, you are fishing with a net that’s riddled with holes.
Start with these questions:
Do I understand how potential buyers are interacting with my website/content on a real-time basis?
Is my CRM automatically updated based on how buyers are interacting with my website/content?
Can I create workflows or sequences that move my target buyers along the funnel even when I’m asleep?
Is it straightforward to run experiments across my digital ecosystem without incurring huge costs or breaking everything?
Can I accurately capture ‘offline’ lead-gen sources and ensure this maps automatically against existing records?
Is it easy for me or anyone else to access records, generate reports or review my analytics across channels?
If the answer is “no” to any of the above, go back to the drawing board and fix it before doing anything else. Trying to retroactively address these issues once the marketing machine is already in motion is hard.
(note – a good place to start for any company starting from scratch is HubSpot. It answered all of the questions above and then some for me across a number of projects)
👉 Value
You need a lead magnet. In fact, you need a lot of lead magnets. Artefacts that capture your target buyer’s attention and convince them to subscribe for more.
Note the language used here – ‘convince’ not ‘require’. Most companies get a little trigger happy in gating their content, demanding an email address for access to anything.
It just doesn’t fly anymore.
When you create something of value, give it away no-strings-attached, and do this consistently, potential buyers will willingly hand over their details to stay informed on where they can get some more.
Focus on producing something of quality and making it easy for a contact to subscribe versus trying to brute force an unwanted relationship.
👉 Process
You can’t have strategy without process. Well, you can, but it will inevitably end up as a raging dumpster fire.
How do you qualify leads as passive versus active?
What happens when a contact flips?
How is marketing involved in the sales journey and vice-versa?
Do marketing and sales have an SLA? and what does it look like?
These are the kinds of questions that, if left unanswered, can trip up even the most well-intentioned organisation.
Get aligned. Get it documented. Share it widely.
Remember, however you cut the responsibility within your organisation, there is only the ‘customer journey’ – they don’t care who is holding their hand from first discovering your brand to signing the contract.
Where things often break down is when marketing and sales operate in silos.
Leaders from both sides of the table have a responsibility to work together to devise and refine the playbook for their teams to work in harmony. And that includes figuring out how things are expected to work.
🥡 Takeaway
Every marketing team should make a concentrated effort on acquiring, nurturing and converting leads – but qualify contacts as passive or active based on their buying intent before involving the sales team. Obsess over your infrastructure, ability to create and deliver value, and processes for the best chances of success.
