Beyond Lead Generation: How B2B Marketers Can Help Sales Close More Deals

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After handing off a delicious, qualified lead to Sales, it’s easy for B2B marketers to pat themselves on the back and call it a job well done.

But Marketing’s involvement shouldn’t stop there. In fact, ending the collaboration at this stage can lead to increased silos between the two teams and finger-pointing if something goes awry. More importantly, it’s also a huge missed opportunity to increase close rates.

In our latest Spark Sessions webinar, Kevin Lord Barry, GM of Right Percent, goes over five principles B2B marketers can master to help sales teams close more deals:

• Measuring lead value the right way
• Aligning with Sales on which indicators to prioritize for lead value
• Creating high-converting ads and content 
• Assigning leads to the right salesperson based on intent level
• Elevating existing sales relationships via retargeting and ABM support

Let’s dive deeper into these five areas of focus so you can start accelerating your sales cycle.

What is lead value?

This cross-functional effort to boost win rates is powered by one key concept all marketers must understand: lead value. Lead value is a probabilistic estimate of the revenue that will be generated from that lead in the future.

Lead value is affected by several factors, such as:

• Qualification: The lead’s number of employees, revenue, or budget
• Intent: How urgently the lead needs your product
• Authority: Whether or not the lead is the decision maker for the business

From those factors, you’ll derive a list of more precise indicators that best define your target audience. For example, you might want to go after leads with 50+ employees, in your target industry, and who want to move forward within 30 days.

But no matter which indicators you prioritize, they will always stem from one of these three sources:

• What the lead filled out on your form
• How they interacted with your website and product
• Qualitative data from the sales team

A useful mnemonic to remember this lead value framework is “Get a L.I.F.E.” (Leading Indicators of Future Earnings). You can also opt for the gentler version: “Create L.I.F.E.”

Lastly, it is crucial to determine lead value as quickly as possible once a prospect interacts with you. B2B sales cycles are typically longer so you don’t have the privilege to wait until deals close to make decisions. Kevin’s recommendation is for every lead to have an attached value within 24 hours. 

"Every single thing a lead tells you when they come in the door gives you some indicator as to their future value."

Aligning with sales on lead value is a priority

By now, you should have a pretty good understanding of what lead value is and the different ways you can measure it. The next step is for Marketing and Sales to be in complete harmony when choosing the best indicators to focus on.

Aligning on a consistent lead value definition enables two key advantages: 

• The two teams can have more productive discussions around campaign performance.
• Ad algorithms can bring you more qualified leads through conversion events.

What do you want from your main conversion events?

Your main conversion signal should be as correlated to down-funnel revenue as possible (L.I.F.E., remember?). Finding the balance between event value and quantity is key; a good start is to choose conversion events that happen within one day of click (e.g., demos booked). Then, aim to get 30 to 50 of these conversions per week per ad set. 

(Related article: How to Increase Conversion Rates in B2B Marketing)

Additionally, try to create secondary events for all your ad platforms. It’s a lot of work, but capturing all the activity on your site or app is necessary to paint the complete picture of campaign performance.

Constant communication = better campaigns

Weekly calls with sales leaders helps marketers uncover findings that lead to better campaigns—and ultimately, more deals. 

Here are the topics that should always be discussed during that recurring meeting:

• Sales: The quality of leads that came in over the last week, complete with qualitative insights and the team’s progress towards goals
• Marketing: What ads are running and how they’re performing—get into specifics (e.g., offers that are resonating with customers, budget allocation changes, new copy and creative tweaks)

"Sales people have the best ideas for how to run ads. They talk to customers all the time and have the magic language that attracts customers.”

Not all leads—or salespeople—are created equal

Leads are complex. So are salespeople (usually). 

For instance, leads have varying levels of intent. A warm referral can usually be closed without too many headaches. On the other hand, outbound leads require more finesse (and often cold-calling). Quality-wise, leads from paid media usually sit slightly above those outbound leads.

The people handling those leads also have different skill sets. Some salespeople feel more comfortable with warm leads, whereas others feel right at home calling people out of the blue. The latter is who you generally want dealing with your paid media leads.

As a quick case study, Right Percent has seen two companies shift the handling of their paid social leads from their inbound to their outbound team. The result? In both scenarios, a 20%+ lift in conversion rates on those leads.

Another important variable that affects conversion rates is time to call leads. This is especially important if the user is likely to quickly forget where they saw your ad. For instance, a lead may not remember filling out your LinkedIn form if you contact them in three days’ time, but will be much more engaged if they get a call from Sales within 30 minutes.

Best practices to create high-converting ads and content 

A lot of context (e.g., everything we’ve just covered) goes into optimizing ads. But there are also best practices that virtually every company should follow. Kevin, whose team has spent $200M+ in media spend over the years, offers two main recommendations: 

Use your visual headlines as a way to qualify your leads

The copy on your ad creative—the visual headline—is the most important factor of down-funnel performance. A nifty way to weed out weak prospects is by crafting visual headlines that automatically qualify your leads. For example, you could:

• Add or imply pricing.
• Add the brand names of competitors or complements that have a similar price point.
• Call out features and use messaging that only high-value users care about.

As an illustration, the ad below qualifies customers by directly addressing the target audience and mentioning product features valuable to that audience. (And as an ad to marketers about an ad platform in an article about ads, it’s also extremely meta.)

Follow three golden rules when promoting content via ads

When it comes to ads promoting content, there are three non-negotiable rules to follow. Your ads need to be:

1. Laser-focused on your target audience
   
2. Closely related to a core value proposition
   
3. Demonstrably actionable for the user
   

If despite following those guidelines, your sales reps are struggling turning content leads into deals, try adding the following question to your form: “Would you like a demo?” Then, only funnel the positive responses to Sales. 40% of respondents will say yes on average, according to Kevin. And if that still doesn’t work, try offering an incentive to users who attend the demo.

Need help building ads that perform and scale? Our Studio RSU team has got you covered.

Assist existing sales relationships with retargeting and ABM support

After all that hard work, deals are finally in progress—and Marketing can sit back and watch! Right? Of course not. 

At this stage, marketers have two valuable tools at their disposal to continue supporting Sales: retargeting and coordination on account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns.

Retargeting

Retargeting is one of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to stay top-of-mind with potential customers. By placing a pixel on your website or landing pages, you can serve ads to users who’ve already interacted with your brand—whether they clicked an ad, visited your site, or viewed a specific product or page. 

It’s a smart way to re-engage warm audiences and drive them further down the funnel. Just keep in mind: because you're only targeting a subset of users, ad volume may be low.

(Related article: What Percent of Your B2B Ads Should Go to Retargeting?)

This low volume might also make it difficult to segment campaign audiences based on stage—most B2B companies are better off running one big consideration campaign and testing several offers users can choose from.

Account-based marketing

In the scope of an ABM campaign, Marketing can be of great help by running digital ads that target select accounts identified by Sales. These ads should contain a variety of offers, especially content promotion. 

Does that sound like a retargeting campaign? That’s because it basically is, except for two distinctions. First, the campaign is based on a list, not a pixel. Second, tracking is entirely different. More on that below.

Attribution for ABM ads

Direct attribution is often impossible when evaluating the impact of your ads on an ABM campaign, so you need to run a lift test instead. Here’s how:

1. Take the full list of contacts in the ABM list and split it in half.
2. Serve half of this list a wide variety of ads (Kevin recommends at least six offers over six weeks).
3. Serve the other half nothing—easy enough!
4. Measure if the segment that was served ads had a higher likelihood of responding to sales outreach.

Struggling to boost your B2B conversion rates? Let Right Side Up’s growth experts help you get more clicks—and more customers. Connect with us today!

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