Let’s be clear, the Lead conversion rate is the rate at which Leads from marketing turn into confirmed Sales Opportunities (a % of which will then hopefullyt close as won business). Let’s also be clear on the fact that not enough of these Leads are turning into Sales-qualified Opportunities for you right now. This is a critical B2B business problem that B2B³ was created to solve.
If you’re not currently using specialized Lead conversion techniques for business-to-business marketing then you should expect very low conversion rates. If you’re not also tracking, measuring and analyzing your business Contact-to-Inquiry conversion rate and your Inquiry-to-Lead conversion rate, then you’re leaving Opportunities and money on the table as well. All these conversion rates are critical to the size and health of your demand generation funnel, and if you don't deeply understand what impacts each of them this puts you in demand gen quicksand before you even really get started.
Low conversion rates in B2B most frequently occur because business-to-consumer techniques and tools are being used. These are designed to communicate to very broad audiences, driving these audiences to immediate Sales-related action. Further, since B2C audiences can be influenced by emotional messages, these techniques utilize them. As you’ve likely probably seen through experience, this doesn’t work!
Effective B2B marketing has to focus on helping businesses (and specific roles within each business) understand the business value of solving a business problem, or more often the business “cost” of not solving a particular business problem, using information-based techniques specific to the business problem, the people who have that business problem, and their current state of mind. By their very nature these businesses and their decision-makers try to make decisions unemotionally.
When you market to a business you must understand that decision making process, we refer to this as the “buyer’s journey.” For every type of business problem, there needs to a customized buyer’s journey; traversing that journey will be business people, financial people and technical people. Some of these will be decision-makers and some will be influencers to the decision-making process. Depending on the buyer’s journey, each of these people we’ll have a relative importance to the process. Some of these buyer’s journeys can be very quick, and some can take years to complete. Using creative marketing techniques that specifically target particular stages in the buyer’s journey, you can optimize the time it takes for roles in specific buyer’s journeys to progress through that journey, ultimately to shortlisting and buying a product/solution from that short list. This may sound like marketing-ese, but the result of this approach and thinking this way with strategic B2B marketing expertise, is significantly improved conversion rates.
The process that B2B³ uses to improve conversion rates has three steps, these are: the Drill, the Black Box, the Handoff. These are explained in much more detail in other parts of this website, and we’ll always happy to share more details of this process with you in a meeting.
B2B³ are experts who have used this process successfully for decades. It’s a fact that over 99% of all university degrees in marketing focus on business-to-consumer marketing. The professional discipline of business-to-business marketing demands unique expertise, and there is no replacement for this B2B experience. If you are frustrated by your conversion rates today, we can help.
