Rapid Growth of Lead Databases Posing New Challenges For BtoB Marketers

September 22, 2008
Written by John Gaffney, Senior Analyst
Published in Feature Articles

The average lead database for a BtoB company contains more than 50,000 entries and is expanding at a rate of 30% to 50% per quarter or 5% to 10% per month, according to a quarterly lead management benchmarking study conducted by Vtrenz. The study of a cross-section of BtoB companies found tremendous growth in some cases for company’s lead databases, but a great deal of inefficiency in executing on those leads. And a big part of that inefficiency may be coming from decidedly 1990s email practices.

According to Bryan Brown, Director of Product Management and Development at Vtrenz, some companies have tracked as high as 160% quarterly growth in their lead databases. But the database growth is not correlating with overall revenue growth, so something in the sales funnel is broken.

“You’re growth rates are either highly efficient and it translates to growth or there is a huge leak in the sales funnel,” Brown explained on a recent webinar that detailed the findings. “I would think about looking at my average lead growth rate and ask myself how much of that growth is leaking out.”

The Vtrenz findings strongly suggest that email, which is still among the most efficient lead generation tactics, is in need of an overhaul. Specifically, the study showed companies that utilize time and behavior-based email marketing enjoy significant lift in terms of open rates and click-through rates.

Brown said using those two client-based strategies will at least help a company better qualify leads, if not convert them into sales. Among the companies surveyed, the open rate for their top 25% of accounts was 48.5% when campaigns moved past targeting and into time and behavior based automation. For manual campaigns the open rate was 27.7%. The difference was even more dramatic when click-through rates were measured. The top 25% of accounts clicked through 26.7% of automated campaigns, compared to only 8.8% of manual campaigns.

Brown recommended four steps for email lead gen campaign management:

Understand relationship to other campaigns. This counts for the competitive set as well as internal campaigns from other divisions.

Benchmark results.Too many companies don’t identify their best practices or compare campaigns.

Reallocate content. If a company moves from single, manual campaigns to an automated, more frequent system, the offers and content within them needs to be reconsidered.