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Lead Volume vs Opportunity Volume
For several years now I’ve been asking subscribers and clients to visualise their online sales process as a funnel with knowable metrics. You’re no doubt familiar with the analogy:
1000 visitors hit your website (“Visits”) –>
100 opt in to your Free Special Report (“Opt Ins”) –>
20 enquire (“Leads”) –>
5 become clients (“Sales”)
Whatever the exact number or specific conversion steps are in your business, you get the idea.
But I recently came across a very useful distinction on a Marketing Experiments webinar that dovetailed with a recent experience working with a client.
That is the distinction between Lead Volume and Opportunity Volume.
Lead Volume is the number of people filling out your enquiry form, but Opportunity Volume is the number of viable sales opportunities available to your sales team (or you, if you’re the only salesperson at your company).
Lead Volume is very often a measure of activity. Opportunity Volume is a measure of results and future expected revenues.
I recently dealt with a client whose only metric was Lead Volume: “Just get us more contact form submissions”.
“More contact form submissions is a brief that is relatively easy to fulfil. For starters, you can make the form easier to complete. Second, remove “strings” from the offer or add a guarantee.
When you do this, will the leads be more qualified? Will you create more viable Sales Opportunities? Not necessarily. In fact, you can very often clog up your sales pipeline with unqualified leads that do nothing more than take up your salespeople’s time and detract from closing genuine sales opportunities.
That’s why I’ve now included Opportunity Volume as one of the key lead generation metrics to track. It is a more reliable indicator of the success of your pre-sales marketing activities.
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finally someone else who sees sales in terms of statistics – lead rates and such. phew, seems obvious.
Comment by vicky — December 20, 2008 #
I think the optimal approach is to combine the best in quantitative and qualitative methods to generate the desired sales results. i.e. strong focus on metrics backed by sound selling methods.
Comment by Will — December 20, 2008 #
Google analytics has a good tool to measure these. Has anyone tried out Motion charts? I am still learning it
Comment by Selbourne Designing — January 7, 2009 #
@Selbourne Designing — Motion Charts within Google Analytics are pretty cool [link here: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=UKsBTqqhVTs, but like any analytical tool, it’s a case of Garbage-In-Garbage-Out. You need to first know your outcome before you can use a tool like this to achieve it.
Comment by Will — January 7, 2009 #
Instead of a funnel I think of it as a qualifying filter, and each step has a finer grade filter to finish with a pure result.
Anyway, statistics and metrics are important and interesting, but dont get paralysis by analysis guys. It’s what you do with the leads that matters.
Comment by Amway Scams Support — January 12, 2009 #
Yep the filter analogy works for me too – whatever you find easiest and, as you say, produces results.
Comment by Will — January 13, 2009 #
Why can’t leads and optys be combined so that sales force have one place to go to begin communication with a potential customer? Converting lead to opty is subjective so why can’t the first stage of the opty be “Lead” and then use this as the filter for expected revenue. The only argument is the cluttering the opty records and the contact records. I think it depends on each company and their sfa lifecycle.
Comment by enr — August 3, 2009 #
While marketing and sales are distinctly different disciplines, they are highly interdependent, and companies suffer when the two functions are not properly aligned or don’t work together effectively.
Generating sales leads is almost always a marketing team’s top mandate. Sales teams rely on marketing to find their leads, and marketing depends on sales to follow up on those leads and effectively develop opportunities. Yet points of contention abound, most often concerning lead quantity, quality, distribution, and timely follow-up.
Comment by Voip Phones — November 20, 2009 #