In our upcoming Future of Lead Generation for Professional Services benchmark research report (to be released in early February, 2007), we asked 726 leaders in professional service businesses a number of questions about their lead generation practices. Among them were these:
Question: Of all the leads that your company generates, what percentage is typically sales-ready?
Answer: 24.7% (mean average)
Question: Of all the leads that your company generates, what percentage typically requires further nurturing to be sales-ready?
Answer: 50.3%
Question: Of all the leads that your company generates, what percentage is typically disqualified from the sales process?
Answer: 24.9%
By industry mean, what percentage is typically sales-ready:
31.8% – Financial Services, Investments, and Real Estate
30.8% – Other Consultants and Professional Services
30.5% – Architecture, Engineering, and Construction
28.8% – Legal Services
27.6% – Accounting
24.6% – Marketing, Advertising, and PR
23.0% – Human Resources and Organizational Development
21.0% – Management Consulting
20.9% – Training and Executive Education
16.8% – IT Services and Consulting
By industry mean, what percentage typically requires further nurturing to be sales-ready:
58.4% – Training and Executive Education
53.1% – Human Resources and Organizational Development
53.1% – Marketing, Advertising, and PR
52.8% – Management Consulting
52.0% – Legal Services
49.0% – Architecture, Engineering, and Construction
49.0% – Other Consultants and Professional Services
47.2% – IT Services and Consulting
44.2% – Financial Services, Investments, and Real Estate
40.6% – Accounting
By industry mean, what percentage is typically disqualified from the sales process:
36.0% – IT Services and Consulting
31.8% – Accounting
26.2% – Management Consulting
24.0% – Financial Services, Investments, and Real Estate
23.9% – Human Resources and Organizational Development
22.4% – Legal Services
22.2% – Marketing, Advertising, and PR
20.8% – Training and Executive Education
20.5% – Architecture, Engineering, and Construction
20.2% – Other Consultants and Professional Services
Takeaway: Nurture the leads you have.
Many companies let the leads they work so hard to generate drop out of their pipeline. (A BtoB Magazine article April 14, 2003 cited a report by the Yankee Group that between 40% and 80% of new business leads are lost, not followed up upon, or otherwise mishandled due to poor company processes.)
In our experience, service businesses are better at staying on sales ready leads, and notoriously bad at staying on leads that need further nurturing.
If your company is one of the many that are poor at staying on leads that are not sales ready when they present themselves, you are likely missing out on 2/3 of your new business opportunities.
This is less a question of lead generation, and more a question of the systems and processes you have in place for lead nurturing: continuing to stay top of mind with prospects that will eventually look to solve their problems with someone’s help (e.g. your help, a competitor of yours, internal staff), and working to help get the issues you can help them with to the tops of their to-do lists.
As a marketer, life would be a whole lot easier if all the leads that came in the door were ready to buy our services. I know our sales team would not disagree. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The real work, ladies and gentlemen, begins when someone raises their hand and says I'm interested. Although our marketing has been able to generate a significant number of leads, the remaining challenge is conversion. A seemingly small increase in overall conversion of 1%-2% can result in significant revenues to our business. We live the numbers you speak of and couldn't agree more with your article. The answer lies right under our noses.