How Much Per Lead!?

If you’re a B2B tech founder with previous marketing experience then you’ll be well aware of the costs associated with creating awareness in your business and turning that awareness into leads. 

It’s certainly not unusual for a steady-state cost per lead to be north of $50 and significantly more in highly competitive sectors. And that’s steady-state. Figuring out how to optimize your marketing funnel requires learning which will necessarily incur even higher costs as wrong turns and mis-steps are navigated and corrected.

Those expensive leads then need to be turned into opportunities, and those opportunities turned into closed (won) deals. How many of the leads turn into closed (won) deals depends on many factors but the conversion rate can easily be down in the single digit percentages. If it was 2% then the cost of acquiring each customer would be $2,500 (at $50 per lead). And that’s steady-state.

Whatever the math works out to be, it needs to make financial sense to your business and, of course, it is the role of your Pathfinder salesperson to develop your predictable, repeatable, scalable, profitable sales process. But the point is, your cost per lead is not insignificant so why not treat any expression of interest in your business as a potential lead?

Why not treat the applicants for roles in your business as potential leads? At a minimum, communicating efficiently with each of them on their progress through the application process will reflect well, even if they are ultimately unsuccessful. With a little more consideration, why not ask for their permission to stay in touch and keep them informed of the progress of your business? After all, you’ll have some form of lead nurturing process in place so why not add applicants to this?

There’s an additional benefit to both parties of staying in touch beyond lead generation. Those candidates initially unsuccessful with their application may be good candidates for future roles. This is great upside for the candidate but for you too. Why re-incur hiring costs when you don’t need to?

The hiring process for your first salesperson is a great example. You’re looking for a Pathfinder salesperson but the vast majority of applicants will be Playbook salespeople. The role of the Pathfinder is to create a Playbook for others to follow. As you grow towards scale-up you will need to hire Playbook salespeople and, in your quest for a Pathfinder, you have already identified many good candidates who are better suited for the Playbook Sales role.

At The Right Five we know that people who are not hired today might be employees or customers of tomorrow. All too often, people that apply to an organization are ghosted, damaging a company’s brand.   

That’s why, as part of our Pathfinder ‘first Sales hire’ solution, we have set up an automated communication system, all candidates will hear from you about where they are in the process – helping you build a strong reputation for future growth.

Where else can you take this approach of expanding your lead generation opportunities? If you’ve taken early stage investment, why not look at turning your investors into growth marketers? That’s a topic for a future post…