Step 5: Determine how many qualified sales leads are needed to meet your sales revenue goals.
To calculate what you will need, consider using my “Sales Lead Calculator”.
This interactive spreadsheet was designed specifically for B2B marketers. It automatically performs a series of calculations based on information you provide about your company’s sales revenue targets, average close rate, sales price and so forth, giving you a realistic number of leads needed to meet your sales objectives.
Using the dollar figures and percentages you enter, the spreadsheet will automatically calculate the following for you:
- Revenue needed from marketing leads this fiscal year
- New customers needed this fiscal year
- Qualified leads needed
- Total inquiries needed
- Total marketing contacts you need to "touch" in order to meet your goals
- Lead-generation budget
- Lead-generation budget as a percentage of sales
- Average cost per inquiry
- Average cost per qualified lead
- Average cost per sale
- Inquiries needed per salesperson this fiscal year
- Qualified leads needed per salesperson this fiscal year
- Qualified leads needed per salesperson per month
The Sales Lead Calculator not only gives you the total number of contact touches you require to meet your sales goal, it also gives you the number of contact touches needed per quarter and per month. Why? Because contacting 1,000 people twelve times a year will get you more qualified leads than contacting 12,000 people once.
| To download the complete Marketing-for-Leads Guide as a PDF, visit B2B Marketing-for-Leads Guide. |
A final consideration about the Sales Lead Calculator is the length of time it takes to close a sale. For example, if you have a six-month sales cycle, you should aim for twice as many leads as the calculator suggests. Why? Because if it takes six months to close a sale to a lead, half the leads you will get this year will close too late to affect the current year’s sales goal.
Consider using the Sales Lead Calculator in a meeting with your top sales and finance executives.
Use it to answer questions like these:
- What lead generation budget will we need to meet our sales revenue goals?
- What impact will spending more per touch have on our lead generation budget?
- How will our average response rate affect our overall results?
- How will the numbers change if we increase our average order size?