You can’t talk about marketing without talking about conversion. Reaching a broad audience that is interested in your company or solution is only the first step in turning contact into a sale, and every professional marketer knows that names fall off from one stage of the sales cycle to the next. Ultimately, the number that indicates your success is revenue – if you’re hitting your targets, you must be doing something right, the conventional wisdom holds. But, there are measures along the way that can help you refine your marketing and sales practices and lead to greater returns on your marketing investment.

Conversion at three points: (1) inquiries that become sales-ready leads, (2) sales-ready leads that become qualified prospects and (3) qualified prospects that convert to sales. If you’re looking to boost your revenue, take a look at your performance at each of these stages to see if you’re experiencing disproportionate attrition.

To see how you’re doing, measure your performance against the benchmark established by MarketingSherpa in its 2009 B2B Marketing Benchmarking Survey (above). The survey finds that:

• 38 percent of inquiries become sales-ready leads
• 39 percent of sales-ready leads become qualified prospects
• 29 percent of qualified prospects convert to sales

A mere 4.3 percent of inquiries lead to sales in the B2B space, according to MarketingSherpa’s results. In addition to evaluating where you stand relative to this measure, think about the difference that could be made through slight changes.

Imagine that you were able to add a full percentage point to each of these conversion percentages: you’d be closing 4.7 percent of all inquiries. That may not seem like much, but it would represent a lead closure performance improvement of close to 10 percent. Improve your conversions at each stage by two percentage points, and you increase your closed deals to 5.1 percent of inquiries — that’s an 18.6 percent improvement in the amount of sales you close.

You can learn a lot from conversion, and even eking out small gains at each point in the sales cycle can lead to substantial increases in your sales results. Dig into the details, and the returns are powerful.

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