Pipeline’s Lead Generation Blog

In the constant struggle to generate qualified leads, most sales and marketing executives unfortunately don’t have a quick, easy and objective way to measure the overall effectiveness of their lead generation efforts.   For many software companies today - generating new, qualified leads is one of their most challenging business issues.

After years of studying, developing and implementing successful lead generation programs and processes for software companies, we have developed a lead generation test that companies can now use to measure the effectiveness of their lead generation program.

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When we engage with a new software company to help them improve or “fix” their lead generation results – inevitably they want the quickest, fastest, easiest way to generate more leads…oh, and can we do that by tomorrow?     If it were only that simple.

If you’re not generating enough leads to satisfy your sales team, there is a very good chance you don’t just have a problem with your campaigns or activities – in most cases you have a problem that goes much deeper than just tactical lead generation activities.  You more than likely have a marketing and sales issue that’s not going to get solved overnight.

In over 15 years of focusing on lead generation solutions for the software industry – our answer to the “quick fix” has remained the same…

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An area of concern – and a hot topic with many of our clients - is the economy.   While the economy is not dominating all of our conversations, it’s certainly an issue that is getting some significant time and attention.   While a few people are predicting a significant downturn, most people we talk to do agree that IT spending does seem to be slowing down.   Some markets and industries are slowing down more than others as the current slowdown certainly appears to be uneven. 

In fact, in a recent Forrester Research document published an June 16, 2008 titled - US IT Market Outlook: Q2 2008, Not So Bad So Far — But There Is Worse To Come In The Rest Of The Year , the author Andrew Bartels summarized, “With Q1 2008 data now in for both the US economy and the US tech market, the year has started out much as we expected. The data so far supports our projection that the US market for technology goods and services will see a slowdown in growth in 2008, to 3% from 6% in 2007. This slow growth rate is mainly due to an assumed mild, two-quarter recession in the US economy.”

But even though the outlook might not be bright, - it doesn’t mean that generating new leads and closing new business needs to feel like it’s impossible.  

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In a December, 2007 article in BtoB magazine, Marketers face challenges from economy to ecology, Kate Maddox writes as one of her top ten trends for 2008, “a big focus for marketers next year will be improving the operations and performance of their marketing organizations, which goes well beyond proving ROI on marketing investments.”

“The No. 1 challenge for CMOs is fixing broken marketing organizations,” said Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council.

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