Ricardo Molina’s YouTube talk explains realistic expectations for B2B event lead generation. He gives numeric benchmarks (site-to-contact conversion, qualification rates, and close rates), stresses that many captured leads will not match buyer personas, and advises patience and mid-term investment (3–6+ months) to see meaningful results.
Chapters
Today I wanted to cover the aspect of B2B event lead generation. And obviously now event leaders and B2B event organizations are really, really pushing hard on the lead generation game. So good for them. There's a lot of investment with the aspects of online communities, there's a lot of investment in marketing automation systems. There's a lot of investment in trying to optimize the whole process of lead generation. But I think it was important for event leaders and eventrepreneurs, as I call them, to really get real with what does lead generation mean and what are the expected results that you're going to get from the lead generation exercise? Because a lot of the times when we embark on the process of lead generation, the answer that comes back from the event leaders is, oh, the leads we're generating are not great, or the leads are crap. And I think it's important for everyone to understand and for all parties concerned to understand what is it that we're looking at with regards to a lead generation exercise. So let's just look at the whole universe of the people that are visiting your website. Right? So you've got X number of visits coming to your site and then all your intention, all you really want to do is to try to get that person to sign up to a newsletter, download an event brochure, or obviously register to an event or ask if they want to speak or if they want to speak. Right. But the reality is that when we're looking at this universe of individuals and yes, let's say that you have put all the forms in place that I'm talking about. Right. With value add content to drive these guys to give you the very precious contact details. Right. On average, on average you are likely to receive between 1% to 3% of these people that are visiting your site are going to become a contact and are going to give you their details. So, so these guys are known contacts. Yeah, known contacts. Some people call it as leads because at least we now are tracking them. We now can see and track their behavior if you're using a master automation system like HubSpot. But out of this total number of contacts, let's say that these guys are called leads. Yeah, and I'm just simplifying this because that's how a lot of organizations just call them leads. Right. Out of this group of people, only one third are relevant. I'm talking about relevant. Yeah, relevant to the product and service that you sell. So relevant, that means they meet your buyer Persona profile exactly as you require. Then that means that 2/3 of these people, in essence are crap or are not good enough. Right. They engage with your content, they've engaged with your organization, they went through the process of filling the details. But when you evaluate this individual, they're not good. So there's a group of people that are not necessarily good. So when someone says, oh, we generated 100 leads, but the majority of them are not good, are not great, my response is great. What is that majority? Is it 50, is it 60? What percentage of these people is not good? If someone says to me, oh, 60% are pretty much rubbish, and I'll say, great, you're above the benchmark. Essentially, if you understand that only that 1/3% of the people that you're going to generate are relevant, then when you see, let's say in a context of 100 leads, if you see 66 are not great, it's very easy to look at the 66 not great as a number and as a factor to be unhappy. But again, in previous conversations, I always work with my clients to think about, okay, let's just think about the good things and, and are the good things that were the good results that we're getting. How do they compare with the benchmark in the industry? So important 1/3 are going to be relevant right now, even within these sorts of individuals, I think it is very important to think that. So going Back to this, 1/3 of the leads that you generate are relevant, which in marketing terms, we're talking about one third are marketing qualified leads. Right. Marketing qualified lead means that these guys meet our profile. Out of the percentage in the total universe of marketing qualified leads, it is almost statistical and especially in events businesses and B2B organizations that we have worked with. I only can speak about the data that we've seen out of this percentage. Then we have 133% are what the sales team would count as accepted. Yeah. That means that the sales team think that there is a potential opportunity there. 33% will be what we call a sales qualified lead. Yeah. And then another 33% just don't meet that criteria, which means you need to nurture. Now, finalizing this, we need to start thinking about from the sales qualifying leads, how many are actually going to turn into a sale. And in the events industry, statistically a benchmark that we always look at depending on where the lead comes from. But generally when you have a pipeline full of contacts in the opportunity pipeline or in the deal pipeline, we are likely to see between 10% to 20% converting into a sale, whether that is attending an event and paying for a ticket or converting into an exhibitor or converting into sponsorship deal. So when you really look at all this context around, when sales teams or when even business leaders says the total number of leads that we've generated over the last month are not great, always look at the context because you're more likely seeing that probably around 1% to 3% of all the totality of the contacts will actually come to some sort of good and proper discussion about becoming, about engaging with you guys. And I think that's a very, very important factor when evaluating a lead generation exercise. And what tends to happen is that organisations invest in pay per click or organizations invest in content marketing, organizations invest in all these other new techniques, video marketing, social media, etc. Whatever you call it. And within the first month or second month a lot of organizations give up. And this is an exercise lead generation. When you start thinking your business about lead generation means meaning let's just give people value add, let's just give them a reason to engage with us outside, come and attend our event. You need at least three months plus to start seeing some good meaningful results that normally I will start materializing within month four to six. So what I see day again and again is that a lot of business leaders kill projects because they don't see good leads coming in through the pipelines in the first month or two. So if you are a business leader, an event business leader, embarking on a lead generation exercise, embarking on a campaign to start a game with people in a different way, you really need to be prepared to be patient and to invest your time and obviously your resource, your financial resource and your human resource time and money in the mid term game. Because otherwise you might be missing out to all the guys that have been playing this game for a very long time, especially in advance, building their online communities and generating in excess of 500 to 600 leads a month, of which they're converting a tremendous amount of concepts into businesses.
