However, since the buyer’s journey and the sales journey has really changed, marketing owns more of the sales funnel than ever before. So it’s really important that once a lead gets into your sales funnel that you have a whole additional set of activities that helps move that lead into your funnel towards conversion. So, again, lead generation does not stop with lead acquisition. Lead generation goes beyond that to lead acceleration. So one of the first steps when you are determining your lead generation plan is to measure your benchmarks.
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So a benchmark is determining where you are today and this will help you set your goals properly. So determine where you are now by measuring the following. So what does your current lead volume look like? What’s your MQL volume? And what are your opportunities look like that are generated per month, per quarter, per year? What are you doing now to generate these different customer leads in the different stages of the funnel? What are your current conversion rates for lead to MQL to SQL to opportunity and to close? So, by conversion rates, How many customer leads that come into your funnel convert to MQLs? How many of those MQLs convert to SQLs? How many SQLs convert to opportunities, and so on.
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If you’re finding that you’re generating a lot of customer leads but a not of them are converting to marketing qualified customer leads, then you know that you might have an issue with lead quality. By really looking into these conversion rates, you can determine where you should be spending your time. What is your current conversion velocity? So, how fast are things moving through your funnel. So once you have a lead into your system, how many days, weeks, months does it take for that lead to hit the other stages? What are your current successes by program and by content? So what are the different types of lead generation programs that you’re running today? What type of content do you have today? And how are those programs and content performing? What are the current recycle rates from sales back to marketing? So of all the customer leads you’re handing off to your sales team, how many of them are they recycling and sending back to marketing? What are your current lead sources? So where do your customer leads come from? Definitely sit down and make a comprehensive list of all of these sources.
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