Fifteen years ago I worked for a B2B marketing agency that had an outbound call center focused on lead generation.  We were quite successful in developing these programs for our clients and the leads were graded based on the answer to the BANT questions.  If this is the case, one has to wonder why many organizations (especially sales people) still want to include BANT as part of their early stage lead qualification criteria?  Here are a few reasons why BANT is not relevant for lead qualification: Traditional Buying is Dead. Lead QualificationBuyers Lie. MORE >>

Tweet We surveyed 1,915 marketers for the 2012 MarketingSherpa Lead Generation Benchmark Report , and asked them about their most widely used lead gen practices. Which of the following lead generation tactics does your organization currently use? To help you improve your own lead generation efforts, here are some insights and tips from our audience…. Please indicate the LEVEL OF EFFECTIVENESS (in terms of achieving objectives) for each of the lead generation tactics your organization is using. Is email a lead gen tactic?” Here is what the data says…. MORE >>

Unbelievably, most are still sending only raw leads to Sales, and they aren’t making an effort to bring those leads to a place where they’re ready for Sales to bite into. Consider data from a new report released by our sister company MarketingSherpa, the 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link). 64% of marketers still send all leads that respond to marketing campaigns directly to Sales. In contacting even qualified leads for hundreds of leading B2B organizations over the years, I have found that only 5 to 40% are ready to buy right now. MORE >>

Just one thing: may you give me some objective parameters to define a lead as qualified? Felix had earlier asked me some questions about cost per lead, which I won’t share here, since the information is private to his company. However, I thought it would be helpful to publicly answer his follow-up question, about lead qualification, on the B2B Lead Roundtable Blog. Lead qualification is …. Defining a lead as qualified basically means they are qualified to talk to a sales representative. The best place to start is with a universal lead definition. MORE >>

According to a 2011 study by MarketingSherpa , 74% of B2B marketers stated that their biggest challenge was generating high quality leads.  The next biggest challenge was a distant second: 49% cited “generating a high volume of leads”. One of the reasons that generating high quality leads continues to present itself as the top challenge (it took #1 honors in 2010 as well) is that marketers are focusing on the wrong thing – lead generation. However, lead generation is irrelevant in today’s b2b marketing climate. The days of B2B lead generation are over.  MORE >>