FEATURE B2B DATA
Feeding the funnel
With so many exiciting data tools and solutions available to help B2B marketers with nurturing customers through the sales funnel, have some forgotten the importance of feeding new leads into that funnel, asks Antony Begley?
B
2B marketing is, as we all know, a tricky, complicated and often subtle business requiring a delicate, intelligent approach at every stage of the sales funnel. While consumer marketers can get away with simply piling enough leads in at one end of the funnel to guarantee a satisfactory return at the other end, that approach doesn’t necessarily work in B2B where prospect volumes are typically much lower.
But has this taken-as-read assumption actually blinded B2B marketers to the merits of an active lead generation programme? Is the temptation to focus on those prospects already in the funnel distracting marketers from the vitally important task of keeping the funnel well few with fresh leads?
In a nutchell, should B2B marketers be focusing on ramping up their lead generation activity as well as finessing their approach to nurturing those already in the sales funnel? Nick Washbourne, Business Development
20 February 2012
Director at Marketscan thinks so: “It’s easy to see how some marketers can become almost obsessed with nurturing existing prospects across all of the available channels.
“There is a reluctance among marketers to give the lead up too early before they pass it onto sales in case they blow it.” Nick Washbourne, Business Development Director, Market Location
“There are so many great software tools and so many great sources of data that they can use to increase the depth of knowledge they have about existing customers and prospects that you can see why they might take their eye off the ball when it comes to feeding the machine – but in
today’s climate taking your eye off the new lead generation ball is a very dangerous game.” Richard Lloyd, Head of Data at Information
Arts, agrees: “It’s certainly true that there are more shiny new toys than ever before that are very interesting for B2B marketers. Lots of them have been up and running for a while now and marketers are starting to see results but in our experience there aren’t always enough ‘about to be interested’ prospects. I think as an industry we might need to get back into acquisition mode, and get more leads into the funnel in the first place.”
As far as Washbourne is concerned, marketers
are almost suffering from their own success in driving the value of data far higher up the corporate agenda: “It’s odd but B2B marketers are almost victims of their own success. They’ve managed to convince their bosses that the data a company holds actually has huge value, but a function of that higher perceived value is the fact that marketers treat customer data with kid
www.dmarket.co.uk
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