Industrial and Manufacturing Marketing Blog

Survey Finds Growth in Pipelines and Sales Cycles for B2B Lead Generation

I recently read a news release put out by Infogroup on their SalesPulse Survey of B2B sales professionals conducted jointly with OneSource, an Infogroup company. Some of the findings match what I am hearing from my industrial clients and one really surprising result.

The top findings I got out of the release were:

  1. 47% of the sales professionals reported a slight increase in the size of their B2B pipelines this year as compared to last year. However, the sales cycles have also become longer, making it much harder to close deals.

    This agrees with what I am hearing from my engineering and industrial clients, they are seeing a lot more activity but the average sales cycle has grown by an additional 90 ~ 120 days. Because of longer sales cycles, more promising opportunities are being lost since business conditions change at the other end and projects are put on hold indefinitely or being eliminated.

  2. A vast majority of the survey respondents reported that outbound tactics outperformed inbound initiatives for generating qualified leads. This one caught me by surprise.

    I am wondering if it is a result of the age-old disagreement between sales and marketing on the definition of a qualified lead. An article I read on Eloqua’s blog “It’s All About Revenue,” shed some light on this. The post discusses “the waterfall” concept advocated by SiriusDecisions where you generate interest (Inquiries/Prospects), a score is assigned based on the action taken and they become a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), some of these get passed on to sales depending on their score and are now classified as Sales Accepted Lead (SAL), sales manages to move one or more of them into the pipeline and calls them Sales Qualified Opportunity (SQO) and if it leads to business, it’s a Close! So the waterfall concept is Inquiry > MQL > SAL > SQO > Close.

    Given the current state of the economy, I find companies in the industrial sector only recognizing SAL’s and SQO’s. Lead generation and lead nurturing have been put on the backburner and clients are interested only in finding leads that are ready to buy now (see my previous post, “The Role of B2B Marketing is Shifting from Lead Generation to Revenue Generation.”). The success of outbound marketing does make sense in this context.

  3. The SalesPulse survey also reported that B2B sales professionals found an inbound lead’s location more important than revenues and the number of employees. Company news and industry SIC codes tied for third.

Sham Sao, the Chief Marketing Officer at OneSource had this to say about the survey, “Despite healthier pipelines reported by sales professionals taking our survey, the majority are still facing longer sales cycles, which makes having the right information to identify hot prospects and accelerate them through the pipeline more important than ever before.” He also said, “Use of information from social media sources and web mining is growing as sales professionals are looking to leverage every piece of intelligence they can find to help progress deals.”

Wait a minute, isn’t that what Content or Inbound marketing is all about?

IMO, content is still the king in B2B lead generation, sales and marketing need to agree on a unified lead definition and figure out how best to use relevant content in driving sales.

Achinta Mitra

Achinta Mitra calls himself a “marketing engineer” because he combines his engineering education and an MBA with 36 years of practical industrial marketing experience. You want an expert with an insider’s knowledge and an outsider’s objectivity who can point you in the right direction immediately. That's Achinta. He is the Founder of Tiecas, Inc., an industrial marketing consultancy in Houston, Texas. Read Achinta's story here.
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  1. How is growth following our stock marketing dropping?

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