The newest posting on Brian Carroll’s B2B Lead Generation blog  has some interesting research data. Brian asked his audience which of the lead issues was most frustrating. The biggest pain point (34%) is converting leads to pipeline revenue. I’ve been in the B2B marketing business a long time and was not surprised by the findings. To be an effective B2B marketer, you need to put as much emphasis on nurturing and converting leads as you do on generating them in the first place. Entire countries can be fed on the money U.S. marketers waste on generating leads that are never followed-up, never incubated properly, never nutured and never show up in the sales pipeline.

By the way, issues two and three, tied at 24% of the survey audience, were figuring out which names are valuable and closing the loop on every lead. Solve these three problems and 82% of the frustration goes away. Sounds like a good plan to me.

Chris