At recent budget meetings, the Lyris marketing team made a bold prediction. We declared that we could generate twice the number of high-quality leads in 2009, with a budget identical to what we had last year. Why were we so confident? Because we'd spent six months putting serious science behind our lead-generation efforts – and here's how you can, too.

Frankly, Lyris was like many marketing organizations. We were so bogged down with the art of marketing – doing all of the time-intensive work that it takes to get campaign creative out the door – that we didn't leave much time for benchmarking and data analysis.

That meant that we lacked scientific data to answer key marketing questions:

• Which campaign respondents are true leads – the ones most likely to turn into paying customers?
• How many leads does it take to create one sale?
• What's our true cost per lead – and more importantly, what number do we need to hit day in and day out to produce leads profitably?

We found out the answers to those questions and overhauled our lead-generation program by steadfastly applying a few key principles.

1. Define What Constitutes a Lead

Originally, like many marketers, we considered any and every campaign response a lead and passed it on to the Sales team for follow-up. But as we all know, every campaign respondent is not authentically interested in talking to Sales, with an intention to buy. We needed a way to separate the hot leads from the not-so-hot tire-kickers.

We decided to add a simple qualifying question to every landing page that let visitors self-select their level of interest in our products as "Interested, please contact me," "Actively seeking solution" or "Just researching." Based on their answers, our sales team took different paths of engagement.

Of course, there are many ways to accomplish lead differentiation. Some companies ask a number of different qualifying questions and then score leads based on the answers. But whatever system you prefer, you need some way of separating ready-to-buy leads from just-enjoying-your-offer respondents.

2. Track and Test Everything

Now that we knew what a lead was, we needed to know which offers, tactics, creative approaches and third-party relationships generated the most top-tier leads at the lowest cost.

We started tracking everything – every email marketing campaign, every banner, every pay-per-click ad. We used Web forms and landing pages with source-code parameters that uniquely identified each iteration of every single campaign.

We also recommitted ourselves to testing everything. Our first tests revolved around offers: "Which white paper produces the most tier 1 leads – the integrated-marketing guide or the email-marketing guide?" Once we knew which offers worked best, we tested all sorts of elements related to campaign creative and frequency. After each test, we determined a champion based on number of top-tier leads generated. For the next test, we'd pit the previous champion against one or more challengers.

3. Monitor Leads All the Way Through to the Sale

Now we consistently knew which offers, tactics, approaches and marketing venues produced the highest number of top tier leads – but we still needed to understand how our leads converted to sales.

We created the mother of all reports that tracks leads from the initial marketing campaign all the way through the sales cycle. Now we can see, for every single tactic we run:

• the total number of leads, including the proportion of top tier leads
• the true cost-per-lead
• the number of leads required to produce each sale
• the average amount of revenue per lead.

This level of specificity took us out of the arty realm of asking our sales team for anecdotal data and into the scientific realm of knowing exactly how many leads we need to produce to meet our revenue goals. We know down to the penny how much a good lead should cost, and we eliminate programs that aren't producing the right leads at the right price.

Treating Marketing as an Investment, Not an Expense

This concentrated, sustained effort literally allowed us to cut our cost per lead in half in only six months. We've identified the programs that profitably deliver the top-tier leads, and we've eliminated programs and vendors that don't. More importantly, we have a clear-cut action plan for delivering twice as many tier 1 leads in 2009 as we did in 2008 – without requiring any additional budget.

Our results prove that when you scientifically analyze what's actually working, you approach the art of marketing in a whole new way. You stop seeing marketing as an expense with a finite budget. And you start seeing your budget as an investment that delivers measurable, provable returns. Here's to a successful 2009, where we all produce more leads at less cost.

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About The Author

Cathi O'Sullivan is director of marketing programs for Lyris. Her team is responsible for executing programs that delivery quality leads to the sales team.

Related Resources:

• Subscribe to Inside Lyris HQ our monthly online-marketing newsletter.
• Download free online-marketing guides, tools and webinars in the Lyris Online-Marketing Resource Center.

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