The #1 Reason CEOs Should Care About Lead Generation

Posted by Dan McDade

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on Feb 19, 2016 7:30:00 AM

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I often say that CEO’s don’t care about leads, they only care about revenue. Unfortunately, unless you, as the CEO of your company, start caring about leads you are going to lose revenue and miss your number. The corporate landscape has drastically changed to make businesses earn their audience's attention. What this means for you is that enterprise sales leads are more important than ever before, and your lead generation strategies must align with your target audience’s needs. CEO’s should care about lead generation simply because it will help them create a sustainable company.


Boosting Your Bottom Line
There are several lesser reasons why a CEO should care about lead generation, many of them connected and intertwined, but the primary goal should be to create and maintain a sustainable demand for your business’ product or solution, and be able to capitalize on that demand by closing new business. It is not just about increasing sales and profits. Rather, it’s about taking the time and effort on the front end to plant the seeds of success that will provide a bountiful harvest full of leads in a few months.

CEOs need to understand the value of a sophisticated contacts database. This database should include a historical account of each lead generated, pipeline information, and a system to disqualify leads so your teams aren’t wasting their time on them. Even the best sales rep has a hard time following up with cold leads, so an understanding of what works and what doesn’t is essential to perfecting the overall company’s lead generation.

Wouldn’t you like to know how much marketing and sales is squandering on leads that are going nowhere?


Aligning Marketing and Sales, Once And For All
Since attracting qualified enterprise sales leads means building a certain level of trust with your prospect, there are a lot of opportunities for failure. Every touch point in the sales cycle represents a chance for valuable information to be shared, or not shared. That information should be constantly refined by marketing, based upon feedback from sales. Did the new white paper designed by marketing address the prospect’s challenges? Do prospects lack knowledge that could be fixed with an infographic? The discussions around these kinds of questions are the kind of feedback that all CEOs (and CMOs) should inspire between marketing and sales.

Additionally, the alignment of these two departments drives home their interconnectivity. Some salespeople have no clue what marketing actually does, and how they are able to contribute to a company’s bottom line. Some marketers think that salespeople only care about increasing their commission. In reality, both departments are directly responsible for increasing the revenue of the company. Sales creates new business, and marketing creates and manages demand for that new business. Aligning the two departments will ensure your company is on the right track towards sustainability.

Marketing for All It’s Worth
When an effective lead generation strategy is in place, everyone benefits. Sales leaders enjoy an increased close rate, and marketing leaders are able to track their revenue contribution.

Lead generation is more than simply collecting contact information for your target audience. It’s about uncovering pain points, gaining marketing intelligence, defining the needs of a prospect or company, and advancing the overall customer-business conversation. Traditional outbound marketing methods like advertising make tracking ROI challenging, but effective lead generation is a marketing activity that positively contributes to your ROI through reduced cost and increased close rates.

Effective lead generation allows marketing to create demand while sales taps into that demand to create new business. While the creation of this lead generation machine does involve extensive thought, it is one of the best ways to make your company profitable in the long run.

The #1 reason why CEO’s should care about lead generation is simply because it will help them create a sustainable company. To truly understand what is going on in your company may take looking under the hood and getting your hands dirty. If you want some help doing that, call me at 678-533-2722 and I will be happy to help.


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Topics: Lead Generation, B2B Marketing, Marketing & Sales Alignment


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