Member Article

How good are your leads?

Nearly 50% of marketers are unconvinced of the quality of their marketing database and believe senior management should focus more on lead quality than lead volume.

In a wide-ranging survey of 100 mid to senior level B2B marketers across the UK, respondents revealed anxiety about the sheer quantity of unqualified leads entering their CRMs and consuming valuable sales efforts. Over 50% of organisations admitted passing Automation Qualified Leads (AQLs) direct to sales with no further offline qualification.

“The survey showed that a drive to increase the number of leads in the funnel, without sufficient consideration of whether these leads will actually progress towards a sale is dangerous to the overall productivity and effectiveness of the sales operation,” explained Clare Warren, Head of Sales and Marketing at The Telemarketing Company, which carried out the survey.

“The fact that a whopping third of marketers (34 per cent) rate themselves quite ineffective, or worse, at ensuring only the most appropriate leads progress, speaks volumes about the over reliance of marketing on technology to perform a qualification function, best achieved by a human.” she said.

Marketers recognised the increasingly positive role technologies such as Marketing Automation can play in their lead generation efforts. However, the survey revealed that 35% of marketers believed poor data was preventing them getting the most out of their marketing investment.

“It may seem an obvious point, but when it comes to data, no amount of analytics or technology will bring any benefits unless clean, accurate data is the starting point,” Clare commented.

“This isn’t just a case of finding and eliminating duplicates and introducing new prospects into the database to make it more responsive; there needs to be a coherent plan for maintaining and updating existing records on a regular basis,” she added.

Despite an awareness that poor data was behind many of the challenges facing today’s marketer, only a handful (6%) sought help from external agency specialists to cleanse their data.

One factor behind this may be the lack of appropriate budget being allocated to marketing departments. “Our survey showed that a lack of resources (62%) and cost (39%) were the two key factors that limited a marketer’s access to high quality data sets,” Clare said.

Clearly the latest marketing technologies can and should play a huge part in generating outbound and inbound sales opportunities and feeding the sales funnel. However, the findings of this survey highlight that human interaction remains essential at every stage of the funnel and critically, results can improve dramatically with closer integration of martech and offline qualification, and with improved quality input data.

ends

Note to Editors:

Established in 1990 and based in Brighton, The Telemarketing Company is the UK’s leading specialist outbound B2B telemarketing agency, with a robust

research offering.

Its total focus on effective telemarketing, CATI research and its reputation for quality has made The Telemarketing Company one of the UK’s leading voice contact companies, acting as the voice of many of the world’s leading organisations.

For more information, please contact James Dempster, Cobb Digital, on 01273 208 913 or email james@cobbdigital.com

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by James Dempster .