Editor’s Note: Leaky sales pipelines are a big contributor to the $2 trillion in annual lost revenue for B2B companies. In this “Plugging Sales Pipeline Leaks” series, we’ll look at common breakages, how to spot them, and how to fix them.
For a broad overview, you can also read “How to Identify and Plug Sales & Marketing Pipeline Leaks.”
Below, we take a deeper look at the problems that plague lead generation.
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The search for pipeline leaks begins with examining lead generation. Organizations often invest heavily in lead gen, only to realize that many of these leads drip through the cracks before they ever reach the sales team. This leakage, often caused by misaligned targeting or ineffective marketing, not only affects revenue but also strains the relationship between sales and marketing teams.
The good news? Harnessing the power of intent data and predictive analytics can pinpoint which prospects truly deserve the sales team’s attention. This minimizes the waste of resources and sets the stage for a much more streamlined and effective lead-to-sales transition.
Dive in as we present the symptoms of lead gen leakage and explore how organizations can leverage innovative tools to revitalize their lead generation process.
The Symptoms of Lead Gen Leakage
Without a steady stream of quality leads, the sales team doesn’t have enough leads to work, resulting in fewer opportunities for conversion and revenue generation. Sales targets that ought to be achievable are out of reach and overall business growth is stagnating.
It can lead to finger-pointing, too, with sales blaming marketing — “These leads are garbage!” — and marketing blaming sales — “Your follow-up is garbage!” — and frustration abounds.
So how do you start to fix the issue?
Let’s take a look at the fictional B2B sales story via Acme Corp., which has been struggling with low lead volume, poor conversion rates, and long sales cycles. Acme’s operations leader decides to investigate, and finds:
- Ineffective or insufficient lead generation strategies
- Targeting the wrong audience
- Relying on low-quality leads
- Using ineffective marketing channels
Here’s how Acme spotted and fixed the issues.
Ineffective, Insufficient Lead Gen Strategies
Organizations can experience pipeline leaks at the beginning of the sales cycle if they’re using lead generation strategies that fail to attract and capture qualified leads.
What can a company like Acme Corp. do about it?
The first step is for their operations leader to review and analyze existing lead generation efforts for gaps and areas that need improvement.
To do this, Acme’s ops team tracks and measures the effectiveness of marketing channels and campaigns. Some of the metrics they value most include:
- Reach: The number of unique personas in their target audience who are exposed to their campaigns
- View-Through Rate: Insight into how a particular ad or piece of content influences accounts to take further action
- Cost-Per-Result: Quantifies the average amount of money spent to achieve a specific outcome
As it turns out, Acme’s lead gen strategy isn’t capturing the right audience (low reach), they’re spending effort and resources on ineffective marketing channels (low view-through rate), and their messaging isn’t moving prospects to act (high cost-per-result).
Acme decides to take the following steps:
- Refine the target audience by identifying their Ideal Customer Profile (more on that in the next section)
- Reallocate resources to the most successful marketing channels
- Use data-driven insights to refine messaging and positioning
Additionally, Acme adopts a multi-channel approach to help prevent future lead generation inefficiencies. Diversifying their marketing efforts with digital advertising, content marketing, social media, email marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO) ensures Acme a broader reach, and enables targeting specific audience segments.
Acme’s ops team also decides to invest in marketing automation and lead nurture tools that streamline the lead generation process. Automation can help capture and qualify leads, nurture them through personalized messaging, and track their progress in the sales pipeline. Lead scoring systems can help prioritize and focus efforts on the most promising leads.
Targeting the Wrong Audience
Part of Acme’s lead gen strategy review uncovered that the revenue team wasn’t pursuing the right audience. In addition to frustrated sales reps, it resulted in decreased conversion rates, missed opportunities, and prolonged sales cycles.
Here are some other metrics across various sources that shows they weren’t reaching their ideal audience:
- Website: High bounce rates, short average session duration or time on page
- Social media: Low engagement, demographic mismatch
- Emails and ads: Low click-through rates, low return on ad spend (ROAS)
- Sales: High cost per acquisition
Acme closed this leak in their sales pipeline by identifying their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). An ICP is a comprehensive description of the type of customer that’s likely to be interested in and benefit from a company’s offerings.
The ICP is created by analyzing historical data on existing high-value customers and understanding the characteristics of the most successful and profitable relationships. Those characteristics include a range of firmographic, technographic, and behavioral attributes.
Since determining an ICP can be a tedious process, the ops team was tasked with finding a solution to help Acme to uncover and use their ICP. That’s when they found 6sense.
6sense provides an AI-driven platform capable of understanding and providing insights based on firmographic, technographic, and behavioral attributes, and enables Acme’s revenue team to identify, segment, and score accounts that fit within their ICP criteria.
6sense also provides real-time insights into accounts that fit within the ICP, so the revenue team can take the right action at the right time and focus their efforts on accounts that are most likely to convert.
Relying on Low-Quality Leads
Other metrics indicated that there might be issues with the leads that sales and marketing were pursuing. Signs of low quality leads, besides an obvious low lead score, are:
- Low conversion rates
- Low engagement
- Mismatch in demographics or firmographics
- High cost per acquisition (CPA) with low lifetime value (LTV)
- Low email open and click-through rates
- Negative feedback from sales
Without a clear ICP, Acme ended up with low-quality leads that were unlikely to convert to sales. But it takes more than just knowing what your ideal customer looks like to make sure your pipeline is getting filled with quality leads.
Acme’s ops leader looked at the lead scoring system and found that it was arbitrary, subjective, and ineffective. After doing a bit of research, she learned about 6sense’s approach to lead scoring, the 6QA.
A 6QA, or 6sense Qualified Account, is determined by taking historical opportunity data and merging it with criteria such as account profile fit score, contact profile fit score, contact engagement score, and account in-market score. By having this objective data, teams can more effectively identify high quality leads and ensure that they are engaging with the right accounts at the right time.
A data-driven approach to qualifying leads improves lead quality overall and helps sales reps know which accounts to prioritize.
Using Ineffective Marketing Channels
Not only was Acme targeting the wrong audience, they were also pouring resources into the wrong channels, and failing to reach and engage prospects. Their social media campaigns missed the mark with messaging that didn’t resonate, and their ads weren’t being seen by the right people. This low visibility and limited reach contributed to the shortage of opportunities for the sales team.
Ineffective marketing was also a source of GTM waste. In addition to low conversion rates, the ops team noticed the following indicators:
- Low ROI and ROAS
- Low content engagement rates
- High customer acquisition costs (CAC)
- Inconsistent monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
- High cost-per-click and, more importantly, cost-per-result
Once again, Acme’s ops team looked to 6sense’s Digital Advertising solution to improve their marketing effectiveness and prevent the loss of opportunities entering their sales pipeline by:
- Setting criteria by role, seniority, and title to reach the right decision-making personas
- Setting custom bid prices and controlling placements for each campaign to adjust spend accordingly
- Controlling when and where their ads run with site, device, and daypart targeting options
- Accessing comprehensive insights into account engagement, pipeline, and revenue impact in one consolidated platform
- Knowing exactly which accounts and personas their campaigns are reaching — and how they’re engaging with their ads
- Enhancing the targeting capabilities of social media platforms to reduce ad spend and optimize personalized messaging
Conclusion
With a comprehensive approach to understanding their customer base and a data-driven approach to lead scoring and digital advertising, Acme was able to plug the leaks in lead gen and get back on track to achieving their sales targets.
If you’re seeing similar room for improvement in your company’s lead generation stage, consider what steps you can take and how a solution like 6sense can help.
Stay tuned for the next blog in the series, where we’ll take an in-depth look at pipeline leaks in the Qualification stage!
