Salesforce shares three ways to improve lead generation: pick a North Star metric tied to revenue like opportunity stage two, prioritize quality leads over volume by measuring cost per source, and run experiments like a two-column form that boosted desktop submissions 10%.
How's it going everyone? I'm Xanth. Today we're talking all about lead generation. We'll discuss identifying your North Star metric, how to build a solid measurement framework, and how to increase your roi. Then I'll give you three tips to help you optimize your lead gen strategy. Let's hop right in. Welcome to Salesforce on Salesforce, an inside look at how we run our sales, service and marketing businesses with helpful how to tips you can apply to your own business. If you haven't seen our episode on how sales and marketing unite behind pipeline to drive growth, check it out here. Pipeline is the glue that holds sales and marketing together. So it's super important that the programs we create as marketers are optimized to drive the kind of pipeline that turns into revenue growth. First, let's discuss what lead generation is. Lead generation can be defined as the process of generating consumer interest for a service or a product with the end goal of turning that interest into revenue. Every business is dependent on inbound demand, either through organic or paid channels. This can be somebody downloading a piece of content, signing up for a free trial, or creating an account for any kind of freemium product. However, not all leads are created equal to run an efficient lead gen program. It's not just about the quantity of leads, but ensuring quality through control of who you're targeting, when you're targeting them, in their journey, where you're targeting them, and then aligning the right message. Let's put this into perspective. Sales teams are getting leaner and marketing budgets are tightening as companies prepare for this uncertainty ahead. On top of all this, competition is growing. It's getting more expensive to acquire new customers. The days when revenue growth was a game of lead volume are long gone. Now more than ever, it's critical for marketers to optimize their strategies to focus on quality to maximize the return for every dollar they spend. If this is an area in your business that keeps you up at night, don't worry. Here at Salesforce we have three tips that you can use as a starting point to help you optimize your lead gen strategy. Tip 1 Understand and build a measurement framework around your North Star Metric. Every business has a point in their customer journey where a person reaches their aha moment and figures out how your product is going to help make their lives and their businesses more successful or more efficient. This could be in product behaviors and interactions, or identification through your sales team, or any combination of these. Think Facebook's metric of seven friends in 10 days or or Slack's metric of 2,000 messages within a team of three users or the traditional SaaS model around opportunity stages. These moments are what we'd call Northstar metrics. A North Star metric can simply be defined as a metric that is a key indicator of business growth and can be tied to increases in product engagement and therefore eventually revenue. It's a metric that's backed by data and that the entire org can rally behind. For us at Salesforce, the the North Star metric is when an opportunity has reached stage two, this means that a prospective customer has been qualified by our sales development org and then verified and accepted by our sales lead. At this step, the sales team will estimate the potential revenue value of the opportunity, allowing us to start to also begin to track an roi. After you've identified what your business's North Star metric is, this is when and from where you can start to build out your measurement framework. This metric is going to be how you measure success and base optimizations around for your acquisition programs and your activities. The types of questions you'll be asking yourself and your team how is the volume trending? What sources are bringing in these types of users and at what scale for your paid channel? Specifically, what is the cost efficiency of generating these engaged users from each of the tactics and campaigns that you're running? This is also where you can start to find the proxy metrics that may be leading indicators of this KPI, particularly as you track them further up your sales funnel. For example, at Salesforce we don't care as much about overall traffic trends, but more so traffic trends from our highest quality sources of leads. If traffic is dropping from a top quality lead source, we need to react quick because we know what the expected downstream effect is. Tip number two not all leads are created equal A common misconception is that a lead is a lead. In reality, not all leads are the same. On the one end of the spectrum, some leads can be less costly, have huge scale but low quality in terms of whether looking for the products or services you offer and therefore their likelihood to convert is low. On the other end of the spectrum, there are leads that may be a lot more expensive but higher quality and ready to buy. Of course, then there's everyone in between. What actually causes the spectrum? There are a lot of factors at play. Things like targeting accuracy, who a person actually is versus who the ad partner thinks they are, how close these individuals are to your target Persona, as well as how far along they are on their buying journey. Is this their first interaction or have they done research beforehand how open are they to learning about your product? Did you interrupt them by pulling them out of their social feed or from an article they were reading? Or were they already in active research mode? The various channels, targeting options and content you pair together to acquire these leads can produce hundreds or even thousands of iterations of who you're acquiring. Ideally, you want to understand which of these combinations produce what quality of leads and at what cost. An example of this variation could look like this on LinkedIn. You target a sales manager within the financial services industry using a customer story from a banking customer, and they've interacted with your business once in the past. They might be more expensive, but they're highly likely to convert. If you target a similar looking sales manager through an ad network with no prior engagement on a banking news article with an ebook through, they're likely to convert significantly lower. So the cost you're willing to pay for them needs to align to the relative decrease in quality. Once you understand the quality of leads across your acquisition sources and campaigns, you can then begin to figure out which sources are scalable. Ideally, you want to spend the most time where there is the most potential for business impact. Also important is where you don't spend time keeping yourself, your team and supporting functions. Working on the highest leveraged areas of your program will ensure your driving the most efficient results across the wider org. Tip Number three Test Learn Iterate Scale Whether you're a one person team or a large enterprise, there's always going to be room for improving the efficiency of your operation. Prioritize Test like you prioritize spend. If you can only run one or two, which are the ones that are going to have the biggest potential impact? If and when you find success, that's when you can take the potential scale you've outlined and maximize it. Due to market competition, ad fatigue, ad platform user degradation, performance will always decline back to the baseline. It's inevitable for all companies, so take advantage of the windows you have and plan to repeat this process often. For our team at Salesforce, we take our highest traffic paid forms and we run variant testing on them at all times. Some of the most basic changes you'd think would have minimal impact have driven significant returns. We ran a simple test changing the layout of the six to eight fields in our form from one column to two, shortening the vertical length of the form. This increased form submission on desktop computers by 10% applied to all paid forms, the scale portion of this process now makes a meaningful impact on the entire operation. Again, not all tests need to be big overhauls. What matters most is that when you do find wins, they are impactful enough to have a material impact on your business. That's three tips on how you can optimize your lead gen strategy to drive more revenue for your business. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Salesforce on Salesforce. Be sure to check out the resources in the description below and check out our other episodes in the series. We'll see you next time.
