Look at this scenario:

• An IT Services company that understands the difference between Marketing and Sales, where marketing does the lead generation and sales does the prospecting
• Their marketing has expertise in outbound activities and not so much on the inbound activities. Their focus is so much towards outbound that the marketing organization does not have the bandwidth to optimize or improve on their  inbound lead generation activities
• Sales tells marketing that for every 30 leads that are passed to them, they are able to manage 1 closure. This is primarily based on the historical data. Management likes the math and they need 40 new customers for the financial year and simple multiplication makes it 1200 leads to achieve new customer targets.
• In this situation, you are talking about 100 leads per month and close to 5 leads per day through outbound marketing activities, and here marketing can only focus on lead quantity and not on lead quality. This effectively would stretch the 30 to 1 ratio to probably 50 to 1 ratio over a period of time. This definitely is the challenge for the company to handle. 

How does this company remove this challenge?

First and foremost, change the marketing orientation from outbound activities towards inbound activities. It is pretty difficult, for there have been successes based on outbound activities, hence it needs a nice balance and a definite period of time for the transition to happen. Inbound works best when your website is optimized to interact with your visitors and capture the leads.

Optimize your website for search engines, be present in industry forums, direct all your thought leadership activities with the usage of appropriate landing pages, test and experiment often with your landing page copy, landing page layout and registration forms, improve conversations with your target market through blogs and social media avenues, and measure the results thoroughly for different combinations.

Most suggested changes above, would work well even for your outbound activities and will improve the quality of the leads received and will certainly reduce the 30 to 1 ratio to something like 15 to 1.

In this post, I have only uncovered what needs to be done and I hope to cover the details on the suggestions in my upcoming posts.