360 Leads Issues a Comprehensive Look at Global Sales-Lead Generation in 2014

Here’s what 360 Leads uncovered in its global study of business-to-business sales lead generation practices with C-level, sales leadership, and marketing executives from six continents.

The most successful sales lead generation channels tend to be those that can offer a high degree of targeting. Ranked in order of effectiveness, outbound telemarketing, email marketing, and digital marketing deliver the best results. Inadequate budgets and internal company issues were cited as the primary reasons for poor lead-generation performance.

Some results from the study:
• Marketing teams view their lead-generation activities as 35 percent more successful than sales does.
• Sales teams view poor marketing-channel selection and marketing teams cite data-list quality as top reasons for lack of performance.
• Sales teams prefer outbound telemarketing as the channel of choice (57.1 percent more than marketing), and marketing selects digital (65.6 percent more than sales).
• Sales teams report that lead nurturing activity is missed 5.7 percent of the time, and marketing believes that percentage is 17.3.
• Marketing and sales both view internal company issues as the biggest factor impacting lead-generation performance.

“Many factors contribute to sales-lead generation performance, but the biggest factor is simply making a collective team effort to do it,” says 360 Leads president Stuart Lewis. “Australia ranks first in achieving sales-lead generation targets at 21.7 percent. While there are many reasons for this, including the fact that [lead-generation] activity level is higher in Australia than in most countries, shared commitment to sales-lead generation, know-how, and teamwork sum up what delivers.”