Opportunity Costs Of A Sales Lead
Opportunity Costs Of A Sales Lead
Opportunity Costs Of A Sales Lead
With any online lead generation campaign, return on investment is becoming ever more demanded as a key performance indicator. And, with the advent of Cost Per Lead campaigns, companies now only need to pay for the sales leads they get rather than paying for complete campaigns.
But, how a sales lead is defined is still a contentious issue. And, when you are paying for every sales lead, is de-duping a cost saving or actually a missed opportunity?
Digital Marketing - Science or Creative?
Think of marketing people and you may well think of creatives. But, the old adage that "half of my marketing works, I'm just not sure which half" is no longer acceptable and the creatives have been joined by the number crunchers.
Digital marketing has introduced a level of measurement that is helping companies hone the way they generate sales leads and reach new customers. By adapting campaigns through constant testing, an audience can not only be reached, but increasingly engaged to take action - the next crucial step in the lead generation campaign.
But, the speed and cost savings that the Internet has introduced has also attracted a mass of lead generation" techniques - some of which are passing themselves off as being a lot more sophisticated than they actually are, focusing on quantity rather than quality. This in turn has evolved the sales proposition for lead generation.
Cost Per Lead
The top players in the online lead generation industry have responded with a cost-per-lead model, where a company only pays for the sales leads they get, rather than by campaign.
This makes the campaign much more accountable as the customer gets more value for their money and the agency works harder to deliver quality sales leads.
Quality of sales leads is becoming ever important as companies look to keep the cost of acquisition down. So, with a higher unit price being paid for each sales lead from an agency, you can understand why customers will insist on questioning the validity and quality of a sales lead to ensure they are getting best value.
What Is A Sales Lead?
Depending on who you speak to, the answer to this question varies wildly. Sales tend to expect a fully qualified lead and marketing tend to expect someone who still needs to be nurtured through the sales lead generation process.
This expectation also varies from industry to industry and between companies with different sales and marketing processes. For example, in my experience, some companies class a sales lead as someone is is ready to buy the product, whereas for others, it's simply the name and telephone number of the relevant procurement manager.
Only Pay For What You Get
But, if a company can define what they class as a quality sales lead, they can demand just that from the lead generation company. They can also negotiate because they understand what they want to buy when they buy a sales lead.
But, this approach to keeping acquisition costs down highlights the issue of duplication of sales leads, which in turn asks the question.... are all sales leads equal?
De-Duping Data
If an online lead generation company supplies sales leads priced per piece of data, then a client tends to insist on de-duping data before they pay for the sales leads.
For instance, if a company runs multiple lead generation campaigns, and certain people have signed up to more than one, they tend not to want to pay twice for the same name.
But, is this an oversight? Are theses leads actually more valuable?
Not All Sales Leads Are Equal
If a person has shown multiple interest points in your service offering, doesn't it make more sense that the sales lead is worth more? After all, they must be more interested than someone who has shown less interest.
Rather than insisting on de-duping, a company could be paying a slight premium to understand which people are interested in potentially larger sales. After all, they must have already bought into the brand because they are saying yes on more than one occasion.
The Value Of Data
Data is the lifeblood of sales lead generation and quality usurps quantity every time as sales (in general) become more expensive to convert.
Rather than seeing data as a linear process, depth of interest and other segmentation rules could actually be saving the sales and marketing team an enormous amount of time and money and delivering more lucrative customers, for a slight increase in cost for the sales lead at source.
Summary
The more a marketing and sales team work together to define what a sales lead means to the business and, more importantly, set in place a system of defining value to data sets, the shorter the sales cycle becomes and the more the ROI increases.
Cost Per Lead continues to offer a manageable way of how to pay for sales leads, but flexibility is needed to remember that not all sales leads are equal.
Understanding your own sales process from beginning to end optimises the process and saves overall costs by delivering increased value.
Ask any marketer and they'll tell you... cost and value are two very different things.
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