Generating leads is one of the toughest and most chronic sources of revenue team waste. B2B companies spend a lot of money — usually hundreds of dollars each — on leads that don’t ever convert into paying customers.
According to Salesforce, only 13% of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) ever convert into real sales opportunities. And of those opportunities, only 6% convert into deals.
Let’s hash this out:
1,000 leads x 0.13 (lead to opportunity conversion rate) = 130 opportunities x 0.06 (opportunity win rate) = 8 deals.
That’s a lead-to-close rate of less than 1%.
How can CFOs turn this terrible ROI around? The first step is asking some sharp questions:
Question 1: Are We Targeting the Right Prospects?
Sales and marketing teams spend tons of time identifying businesses that could make great customers. They represent your Total Addressable Market (TAM).
Here’s the rub: Most of those accounts have no interest in making a purchase right now. Only about 10% of them represent true revenue opportunities. But teams often spend enormous amounts of money trying to reach the 90% of companies that aren’t ready to buy.
Guesswork means revenue teams have to over-invest to have any hope of hitting sales goals. This colossal inefficiency and waste should concern every CFO.
But what if your team could stop guessing. What if, instead of searching for a needle in the haystack, your revenue team could generate a stack of only needles?
That’s what buyer intent data helps marketers and sellers do. Intent data is a collection of signals that indicate which companies are interested in your solution and — with the aid of artificial intelligence and analysis — how close they are to making a buying decision.
By targeting only potential buyers and prioritizing buyers who are closer to deciding, sales reps can generate 120% more annual revenue than those who don’t, according to some reports.
Question 2: Are Our Leads Good?
Why do only 13% of leads convert into opportunities, per Salesforce’s stats? One problem is that a lot of people who fill out forms on your website aren’t really buyers. They’re looking for preliminary information, or they’re genuinely interested but lack the authority to buy.
A more fundamental problem is that companies often define leads by looking at the behavior of individuals. But buying group behavior is what matters.
B2B buyers hunt in packs:
- Buying teams have an average of nine individuals
- But those numbers can fluctuate between an average of seven and 19, depending on deal size
- Groups also tend to grow when businesses are restricting budgets during times of uncertainty
Intent data should be used to collect buying signals at both the individual and account level. When multiple buying team members are doing similar research, that’s a strong sign the account is preparing to buy.
AI can be used to predict an account’s buying stage, which helps your team spot which accounts are ready for direct outreach. By focusing on these accounts, your sales team can improve their close rates. A Forrester Total Economic Impact study of 6sense found that customers generate 4x the sales revenue by targeting accounts that 6sense has identified as ripe for outreach.
Question 3: How Much Time Do Sellers Spend Selling?
According to another Salesforce study, sales representatives spend only 28% of their time on revenue-generating activities. The problem is that teams don’t often have the kind of enablement tools that can remove non-revenue-generating activities from their task lists.
Common time killers include:
- Identifying and researching prospects
- Cold outreach
- Lead qualification
- Data entry
- Flitting between software platforms
- Preparing sales reports
CFOs who make the right investments in technology can bring transformative efficiencies to their revenue teams.
Question 4: How Many Leads Are Being Ignored?
Well, they either get ignored, or they get enrolled in generic email campaigns until they hit the “unsubscribe” button.
You should ask what percentage of leads are receiving personalized email communications and responses? According to McKinsey, companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue.
Of course, there aren’t enough hours in the day for your sales reps to send thoughtful and personalized emails to every single lead. Fortunately, generative AI is making mass personalization a reality — and the results so far are staggering.
6sense’s rapidly evolving Conversational Email solution generated impressive results with early adopters, who saw:
- 50% reduced deal cycle time (marketing-sourced) opportunities)
- 1.5x increase in average deal size (marketing-sourced opportunities)
- $900K of new pipeline generated in four weeks
Conclusion
CFOs should ask their companies’ sales and marketing leaders these questions and help champion solutions. AI has opened up profound opportunities to improve ROI, reduce go-to-market waste, and boost the performance of sales and marketing teams.
