Who Owns Lead Generation – A B2B Survey

Who Owns Lead Generation – A B2B Survey:

3FORWARD recently conducted two webinars with the Outsourcing Institute focused on creating and qualifying sale ready leads. As part of the webinar registration process attendees were asked to answer three survey questions on lead generation, sales team size, and deal size. The majority of the respondents were in sales and marketing, some in lead generation and some from executive leadership.

While the poll is not completely scientific (it is possible that more than one person responded from some companies, for example) we thought the results we quite interesting and worth sharing with others. As you can see from the chart below there is a good cross sampling of sales team and deal sizes.

What’s very interesting is that over 40% of respondents indicated that the sales team was fully responsible for lead generation activities. Regardless of the size of your selling team, having sales responsible for lead generation is like having a brain surgeon doing pre-employment physicals; it’s a huge waste of a very valuable resource!

Also of note is that 15% of responders said they were not sure who in their firm was responsible for lead generation activities; a scary thought and hopefully those answers came form non-sales and marketing people.

It was good to see that 15% of the responders indicate that they have an inside sales/telemarketing team pre-vetting leads. This approach is cost effective and ensures that your valued sales resources are focused on the highest probability targets. This is especially critical for companies selling large contracts with long selling cycles.

Let us know if you are interested in a conversation about how your company compares to these survey results. You may also be interested in a Lead Optimization Review to talk about improving your results.