Driving Revenue Growth

“70% of the buying cycle is complete before the buyer wants to connect with Sales,” explained Miller. So calling a prospect prematurely will only frustrate your sales team, lowering closure rates and diminishing their effectiveness.

“A prospect who downloads a whitepaper is probably just getting started on their due diligence,” offered Miller. “But the ones who click on your pricing info or watch a detailed product demo are telling you they are serious and open to talking.”

Not only do long data capture forms discourage completion but also, reported Miller, people often lie when filling them out. Instead, just get their name, title and email and then cross-reference the lead using their email domain name and third party data.

Assuming only 20% of the names you capture online are hot leads, the other 80% are still worth nurturing via an on-going content marketing program. Doing this, Miller and his team expect to convert half of their other leads over time.

While marketing only generates 30% of the leads at most companies, at Marketo marketing drives 80% of the sales pipeline. With a hefty marketing budget, Marketo also makes sure its internal team is well compensated for their measurable results.

Once you provide the sales team with better leads, their closing rates will increase and so too can their quotas. This also means that sales can focus on closing and not on educating prospects, something that would typically suck up 50% of their time.

A Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is not “a glorified Head of Sales,” explained Miller, but someone who can lead “a fundamental transformation about how you think about generating revenue.” Marketo just hired such a person. Have you?