Let’s look at why this is.

Funnel stage affects your ability to nurture and build intent models

This image gives you a life of a lead over the course of the lead’s lifetime or an entire program’s lifetime. The movement from left to right along this curve shows the lead moving closer to purchase or down the funnel. Consider the peak of the curve as your in-market opportunity.

You’ll purchase content syndication leads in the left-hand part of the curve: where they’re in the beginning of their buying cycle. That means that you have those individuals in your Rolodex prior to them moving in-market.

On the other hand, when you purchase a BANT program, you’re buying access to leads who are at the peak of their in-market opportunity. These leads will make a decision and move on pretty quickly. The speed of the lead’s decision — and your limited access to the lead prior to the decision phase — means that you have very limited time to influence and nurture that purchase decision or build intent models based on the lead’s behavior.

Funnel stage affects cost per opportunity

This version of the chart shows two lead lifetimes or two separate programs that peak in-market at different times.

While the cost per opportunity or cost per KPI (CPKPI) for your BANT leads stays the same across both of these programs, the CPKPI for your content syndication (CS) leads will go down as you nurture more of those leads in-market.

With BANT leads, you purchase those leads while they’re in-market, and you have two options: close or lose them. These leads are one-time use and have a very limited lifespan, because they’ll make a purchase decision relatively quickly.

On the other hand, content syndication and other TOFU leads will show a decrease in CPKPI over time as you improve your nurture cycle, gather intent data, and move those leads in-market.

This is why you need to read your programs as a portfolio and look at their relative costs and pipeline over an extended period.

In the first couple of months of comparing BANT and content syndication leads, your BANT leads will likely have a lower cost per conversion, because those leads are already in-market. But as your content syndication leads move in-market, and you build your pipeline, you’ll see the CPKPI for the content syndication leads decrease while your BANT lead CPKPI will stay consistent.

Create a consistent, scalable pipeline

Let’s look at how this translates into creating a pipeline.

BANT leads create a consistent number of opportunities every month, and depending on your sales cycle, you can pretty easily predict how many conversions you’ll create every month. Lots of lead generation managers are seduced by this consistency, but because of the scarcity of leads in-market at any given time, purchasing BANT leads only scales to the limits of the market.

Content syndication leads provide greater range for scale, and they can also drive more opportunities over the lifetime of the lead than BANT leads. This image shows how three sets of CS leads, purchased in Q1 of this example year, might fare. While the leads don’t start converting until April, by June the number of opportunities peaks at twice the rate of a BANT program.

In this example, BANT leads will consistently convert every month, but CS leads will build up to a peak. Continuing to purchase those CS leads means that you can continue to nurture leads, lining up those peaks back to back each month.

The result of running long-term content syndication lead programs is a consistent pipeline of opportunities, where the CPKPI decreases consistently, and the total number of opportunities increases well past the total opportunities provided by a BANT program.

Do the math to really understand the long-term effect on your pipeline

Every company, program, and sales cycle is different, but the payoffs for purchasing leads before they move in-market is clear. With content syndication leads and other TOFU programs, you control your nurture campaigns and your sales outreach cadences, which has an effect on the overall conversion rate. With BANT leads, you trade some of that control for a speedy decision.

Whether you choose to purchase programs at the top or bottom of the funnel, TechnologyAdvice provides dedicated 1:1 support for your leads. Let’s talk.

The post The Truth About BANT Leads And Your Long-Term Pipeline appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Stock buyers perform fundamental analysis when they research what stocks they should add to their portfolios. By looking at several performance factors, the buyer can better understand how small changes in the company will affect the long-term value of the stock.

My advice is for you to take the same multi-factor approach when judging your portfolio of lead programs.

By comparing the same metrics across all of your lead programs, you can better predict how changing your investment in those programs will affect overall performance. I’ve even put together a handy calculator where you can plug in your numbers and test it out for yourself.

You’ll need to make a copy of the Google Sheet to plug in your numbers.

The best part about looking at the portfolio view of your programs is that this view isn’t limited to your purchased leads. Add in your PPC campaigns, your events, your email marketing, and any other lead generation program with a quantifiable budget and a tracked conversion rate.

Step 1: Gather your programs

I suggest that you compare your programs over a timeline of at least 6 months. This will give you a baseline for spend and conversions that takes into account your full sales cycle. Start by gathering these metrics:

Step 2: Calculate the portfolio totals

Use simple addition to find these two metrics. Add up the total budget you spend across all your accounts and the total volume of leads you get from those accounts.

Total budget: how much you spend across all of your programs
Total (lead) volume: the number of conversions across all your programs.

Step 3: Calculate your effective CPL

Your effective cost per lead (CPL) is your total budget divided by your total lead volume.

Again, this the total across all programs, rather than weighted based on program. You want to understand what you pay per lead across all your programs, not the CPL for each individual program.

Step 4: Calculate the effective conversion rate

When you calculate the effective conversion rate, you don’t take an average of all of your conversion rates. Instead, divide all of your conversions by all of the leads you deal with in that timeframe. This will tell you how many conversions you get across all your programs.

Step 5: Calculate cost per KPI (CPKPI)

One metric of success that many marketing departments use is how many opportunities or conversions — phone calls, successful contacts, or appointments, however you define this — you create during the time period. The amount you spend to create those opportunities is your cost per KPI (CPKPI).

First, gather the total number of conversions you created across all of your programs. Then divide your total budget by the total number of conversions to find the CPKPI.

Step 6: Calculate pipeline created per lead (PCPL)

Pipeline created per lead is the total amount in your pipeline divided by the total volume of all leads. This metric tells your sales team how much each lead contact is worth. When you know this metric, you can remind the sales team that every phone call, email, and client touch potentially contributes that much to the pipeline.

First, add up the total pipeline created across all your programs. Then divide that number by the total volume of all your leads.

Step 7: Analyze

When taken together, these metrics for individual programs and for the portfolio as a whole can give us a deep understanding of

• Overall pipeline
• Overall efficiency
• Performance KPIs over time, especially opportunities, CPL, and average pipeline value (APV)

Step 8: Predict

Now you can start playing with the numbers by adjusting your investments in different programs, testing proposed CPLs, and forecasting the amount of budget you will need in order to meet a revenue or pipeline requirement.

Use the calculator to understand how little changes in any of your programs can affect the whole portfolio.

Consider:

• How adding in a new program can affect performance or revenue
• How much does each program contribute to your total pipeline?
• Would dropping some programs that don’t immediately convert actually decrease your total conversions over time?
• Do you need to pay top dollar for BANT leads, or would a longer-term strategy with a higher investment in content syndication leads pay off more in the end?
• What is the impact of reducing your display or PPC spend?
• What impact would a greater investment in organic growth have?
• Where could you cut spending to invest in new properties or more sustainable practices?
• How many leads you need to achieve pipeline

You’re probably not going to positively impact all of your KPIs at the same time. So you’ll have to decide what’s more important to you, for example: can you take a reduction in conversion rate if the overall value of the pipeline increases?

Positively impact (most of) your metrics

One way to positively impact the numbers across the board is to increase your Average Pipeline Value (APV).

It’s not about controlling the quality of the leads that you get (because, really, you can’t control that), but you can control what you’re paying for the quality of leads that you get.

To increase your APV, you’ll need to increase the deal sizes that you get from your current conversion rates. One easy way to do that is to increase company size in your lead targeting. This change may increase CPL and decrease conversion rates in the short term, but over the long term those same moves will increase the APV.

You can negotiate CPL (especially when you can show relative worth of the leads you receive) — which is why doing this math is important.

This blog post has been adapted from a talk that I gave at the Music City Lead Generation Summit in October of 2019.

The post Redefining KPIs: How To Evaluate Your Marketing Lead Programs As A Portfolio appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

We have to stop relying on the gut-feel metrics of CPLTMSTAL (cost per lead that my sales team actually likes) and start using the data available to us to understand exactly how each lead touch can pay off over the course of a sales cycle.

You could track common metrics like cost per lead (CPL) or cost per KPI, but these metrics only take you so far. With a little more (relatively simple) math, you can figure out how much pipeline you generate per lead — which can help you better understand the total long-term value of your purchased lead programs.

This article will take you through the steps of calculating the pipeline created per lead (PCPL), a key metric in understanding the true value of your lead programs.

Definitions:

• CPKPI: Cost Per KPI
• APV: Average Pipeline Value
• TPP: Total Possible Pipeline
• PCPL: Pipeline Created per Lead

Calculating PCPL

PCPL is your advanced metric. It tells you how good your program is at creating pipeline. It tells you the amount of potential revenue you create for every lead contact you make or nurture action you take.

Let’s get started with two example content syndication programs.

Based on the information in this image, you’d probably say that program B looks better. It has the most conversions and the best conversion rate. That checks out when you calculate the CPKPI.

So let’s take another look at the two programs and compare their CPKPI. Program B still looks pretty good here, with a lower CPKPI.

But if we stopped here, we may not fully understand the long-term impact of going all in on this particular program. In order to see the full financial impact of choosing either of these programs, we want to calculate a couple more metrics: APV, TPP, and PCPL.

To begin, you’ll need one outside metric: your total pipeline generated. Pull metrics for the total pipeline generated per program over the course of at least six months to give you a baseline that takes into account your sales cycle.

Now, let’s calculate average pipeline value (APV). For each of your programs, divide the total pipeline created by the number of conversions. Then compare your two programs again.

By adding these metrics, we can see that while the difference in pipeline created doesn’t feel that big, the APV shows a significant difference in the value of each conversion.

Now let’s add another value to understand scale: total possible pipeline (TPP). You’ll need to ask your provider to give you the maximum volume of leads they can provide in any given month to see your limits.

So, while program B looked good at a volume of 400 leads a month, that program starts to falter as we attempt to scale. The differences in TPP for programs A and B are starting to show. But we’re not done yet!

We still need to understand how efficient each of these programs is for your team. To do that, we have to figure out pipeline created per lead (PCPL).

The PCPL for these two programs is about the same. But the total pipeline that they’re working towards depends on all the other factors.

Would you rather your team spend time calling out on 500 leads at a $2,000 PCPL with a potential pipeline of $1 million, or 400 leads at the same PCPL that only gets you $800,000 in the end?

PCPL tells your sales team how much each call is worth and, ultimately, which programs they should focus their time on based on data, not on gut feeling.

While your sales team may “know” that they have better success when they call out on individuals that are higher in the org chart, that may be confirmation bias, because it feels like they’re having more success. The leads they call out on from program A may “feel” less successful, but they result in more total pipeline and more revenue.

When you can trace the pipeline, the ultimate value of the work, and the total revenue that the program brings in, you don’t have to work off gut feel.

This blog post has been adapted from a talk that I gave at the Music City Lead Generation Summit in October of 2019.

The post The Most Important Lead Metric You’re Not Tracking is PCPL: Pipeline Created Per Lead appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

That’s because BANT lead trees only grow in the same fictional world where unicorns, elves, and dryads roam.

Every week, clients ask me for hundreds of BANT leads* that will convert at 40 percent, and they want to pay $50 a lead.

Look, I get it. Marketers need to show sales they can build pipeline and show their CMO a positive return. But, just like magical trees and unicorns, BANT leads do not roam free in the wild, waiting to be harvested in large quantities.

*BANT leads: leads that meet defined criteria for budget, authority, need, and timeline

BANT leads do exist

To be clear, I’m not calling the BANT lead itself a myth — only the notion that companies can cheaply purchase huge amounts of them to close down new business with minimal effort.

BANT leads do exist, and you can generate them through a number of different channels.

Inbound marketing is a great way to drive highly-qualified, bottom-of-the-funnel leads. SEO, organic search, and review sites are also great ways to target prospects who are researching a specific product. If you do this well, you can start plenty of sales conversations and close leads quickly at a cost per acquisition that is well below average.

But many sales teams only want to see these types of leads, and marketers can’t produce enough.

Why can’t marketers produce enough? Because BANT leads don’t grow on trees. At any given moment, only about three percent of businesses are looking to buy a specific type of solution. These are the people visiting your product pages or engaging with review sites.

In the B2B world, even these prospects will take time to make a purchase decision and sign a contract.

If your company has a $150k average deal size and a 12-month sales cycle, why are you trying to buy leads who have a specific timeframe and budget? If you aren’t already engaged with those leads early in the research process, you will lose them to competitors.

Period.

Buy in bulk, then nurture

According to a case study done by Meclabs, 20 percent of customers come from leads that were acquired more than a year in the past.

Stop trying to generate only BANT leads from top-of-the-funnel programs (like telemarketing and content syndication), and nurture what you already have! Ever hear of marketing automation? Guess what. When those leads have been nurtured and they’re ready to buy, you will be the first vendor on their list.

Here’s the good news: top-of-the-funnel programs can yield BANT leads. But if you want to find the needle(s) in a haystack, you have to buy the whole bale.

If you only purchase leads that meet BANT criteria and try to show ROI immediately, you will cripple the long-term health of your pipeline.

Time for a little math. 1,000 content syndication leads should yield 10-20 BANT opportunities, on average. The rest need to be carefully nurtured, and more will become customers over time.

If 1,000 leads cost $40,000, and you only contact the BANT leads, you’re paying $40,000 for 10-20 leads. Break that down further, and you get a $2,000-$4,000 cost per opportunity. Think $2,000-$4,000 per opportunity is high? That’s the going rate for quick ROI.

The funnel is smaller at the bottom

If you only purchase leads that meet BANT criteria and try to show ROI immediately, you will cripple the long-term health of your pipeline.

Instead, spend time nurturing your top-of-the-funnel leads, and expect them to convert over time. The marketing funnel is smaller at the bottom for a reason. Stop trying to flip the funnel. No one uses an upside-down funnel for anything, ever.

The best thing you can do as a marketer is to ask questions to identify pain. Let the nurture process and the sales team create urgency. Over time, more and more of your leads will clarify their intentions and become qualified, even BANT qualified.

What steps are your team taking to maximize ROI for lead gen programs? Let’s talk about how we can decrease your CPL, increase your conversion rates, and make sensible lead acquisition part of your marketing strategy.

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