Lead generation is a key indicator of a business’ growth. Lead generation cost is critical in assessing marketing ROI. Businesses with revenues less than $500 million spend about $180 per lead. Businesses with revenues above $500 million spend about $430 for every lead – this is more than double the cost spent by businesses with less than $500 million revenue. (Statistics source: HubSpot Marketing Survey Report)
With expensive costs involved, your lead generation process would be futile if your leads are not converting. Lead pacing is critical in this context as it helps increase the efficiency of your lead generation and thereby your sales process.
Lead pacing is a process that determines the distribution of generated leads to facilitate maximum opportunities for conversion. The process focuses on factors such as movement and timing of leads in the pipeline as well as their distribution among your sales teams. As a result, each lead passing through your sales funnel receives maximum attention and opportunities for nurturing. This, in turn, amps up your opportunities for a conversion.
Lead pacing is key to maximizing the efficiency of prospect engagement, and hence is applicable to every stage of your buyers’ journey. Whether you are seeking ToFu, MoFu, or BoFu leads, pacing improves process results for every segment of your sales funnel.
A well-developed pacing process keeps your pipeline efficient, sales teams meaningfully engaged, and puts your business on the path to sustained growth. So, how does pacing impact the efficiency of your lead generation and sales process?
Lead pacing, with its focus on lead timing and movement, makes it essential that each connection generated by the business is meaningful. With pacing in tow, your lead generation process ensures that communications with your prospects are tailored to their needs.
With such customized communications, your leads are businesses truly in need of your solutions and not some random irrelevant targets. This efficiency in targeting directs leads that are high in quality to your sales funnel.
In The State of Lead Conversion survey report, 44% of participants cited a busy sales team as a reason for ineffective lead follow-up. Lead pacing improves the efficiency of your sales team by enabling thoughtful distribution of quality leads among your reps. Your sales teams do not get overloaded or burnt out in trying to convert leads. They get to focus reasonable attention on each prospect to establish rapport and encourage the next best actions.
A typical B2B sales closure takes 3 months on an average. With lead pacing at the core of your lead generation strategy, it is possible to reduce lengthier sales cycles. This reduction can be attributed to the highly personalized engagement that pacing facilitates.
Also, leads are optimally mapped to sales staff, which enables them to give their best to assigned leads. This steady and structural approach establishes trust and cultivates authenticity for the brand. With trust, conversions and closure fall into place quickly.
In a typical B2B purchase decision-making process, there are 6 to 10 people involved. Each of these authorized individuals uses at least 4 information pieces drawn from their own research to arrive at their decisions (Gartner via Shopify).
Meeting your buyers’ preferences and needs is critical in closing B2B sales. Lead pacing arms your sales teams with valuable time needed to gain critical insights into each buyer’s purchase journey. This intelligence makes it possible to align your process with your buyer’s decision-making journey.
You travel the journey along with your buyer, guiding them with customized information and making the buying process simpler, which eventually fast-tracks purchase.
Reaching out to your buyers with tailored communications and nurturing them by offering solutions relevant to their pain points, builds strong relationships. This positive experience translates into trust and loyalty, which are the best forms of expression from satisfied customers.
Absence of the following strategies can hinder the implementation of successful lead pacing:
Maintaining a thriving pipeline and nurturing leads is relevant only when generated leads are relevant. Achieving this relevance demands high-precision targeting. Meticulous and iterative segmentation based on specific parameters, including firmographics, technographics, and demographics, is key. Segmentation delivers highly-focused buyer segments that can be nurtured using lead pacing.
Lead scoring helps identify prospects that are more likely to convert. Analyses of data, including intent data, buyer behavioral data, and demand-compatibility indicators, are crucial to assign lead rating. Efficient lead scoring helps you optimize resources and staff in the best possible way.
By prioritizing leads based on their intent to convert, you can focus your best people on conversion-ready prospects.
Intelligent automation triggered at specific touch points and upon specific buyer actions readies your leads for effective pacing. Personalized communications, delivered consistently with automation, increases engagement while lowering workload on your teams.
Unaligned sales and marketing teams mar pacing efficiency, leading to a stunted pipeline, demotivated sales teams, and frustrated buyers.
In the B2B landscape, where authentic connections transform into high-value leads, lead pacing serves as a powerful strategy to drive sales and strong customer relations. Well-developed leads can go waste without a strong pacing strategy. Lead pacing needs to be integral to your lead generation to achieve sustained growth, and impressive marketing performance and ROIs.
Effective lead pacing requires high-quality leads, accurate data, expert strategies, and team alignment. FinalFunnel, a demand generation solutions company, can help you streamline your lead pacing process with proven strategies for high-precision targeting and lead qualification. We route well-organized prospects to your sales teams for further engagement. Discover our strategies and powerful tech stack that enable us to achieve complex B2B lead generation objectives.