B2B Lead Generation – How Much Information Should You Capture?
Posted by Christopher Ryan on October 27, 2011
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I just read an interesting article at Web Ink Now, titled New B2B Lead Generation Calculus. Noted marketing thought leader David Meerman Scott revisits that often-debated topic of whether it is better to collect opt-in data before allowing people to download your content, or to make that content available without requiring anything from the website visitor.
As Scott explains, “There are those who believe in making content like white papers totally free without registration in order to spread the information as far as possible. For these folks, value comes from many more people being exposed to the content and spreading the free content via social networks. My research suggests that between 20 and 50 times more people download free content. But you get zero traditional “leads”.
Scott has a point and at Fusion Marketing Partners, we often deal with this issue. If you ask a sales VP or CEO what they want out of marketing, they will say something like: “lots of high quality leads.” And one of the attributes of a high quality lead is full information about the prospect. What they fail to understand (until we show them the numbers) is that there is an inverse relationship between lead quantity and lead quality.
