EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Lead management process maturity pays off big time. Business-to-business (B2B) firms that fall into the top tiers of our Lead Management Maturity Model enjoy better sales follow-up rates and close a higher percentage of marketing-generated leads. But only a fraction of firms have achieved peak performance. B2B marketers must benchmark their lead management processes in order to define a realistic road map for process improvement. They should start by aligning key departments — like telesales, customer support, and field marketing — around shared lead quality definitions that alter long-standing beliefs, practices, and organizational structures in favor of streamlined practices that report on opportunity progress at every stage in the sales process.

MATURE LEAD MANAGEMENT PRACTICES INCREASE SALES RESULTS
In the first report of this series, Forrester introduced a framework that categorizes firms into one of four lead management maturity levels.1 For this report, we surveyed 252 B2B marketing professionals to better understand how current lead management practices stack up across the industry and to learn how lead management maturity correlates with sales success (see Figure 1). Overall, we were pleased to find that most firms have progressed beyond the basics and are working to standardize processes and metrics. While 13% percent of respondents focus more on filling the pipeline, the majority of respondents (78%) fall into the middle tiers of our model (see Figure 2). Among the 42% of firms that scored in the top two tiers, we saw:

• Sales act on more leads. Bickering over contribution to sales success is inevitable, but sales follow-up rates increase markedly as firms improve their lead management proficiency (see Figure 3-1). Overall, more than one-third of B2B marketers say that sales reps follow up on 75% or more of the leads they generate. In contrast, 46% of marketers at firms with mature lead management processes — and 13 out of 20 of the topmost performing companies — achieve this high level of sales responsiveness.
• Follow-up times decrease. Forty-one percent of marketers report a one to three day lapse between the time when sales reps receive marketing-generated leads and when they follow up on them. On average, only 10% of marketers say that sales calls leads back within a day. Yet nearly 25% of marketers from firms with the most mature (level 4) lead management practices report that sales routinely contacts leads within a day. To ensure that leads are pursued in a timely manner, many of these firms fund an inside telemarketing team within marketing that is responsible for lead followup and measured on the final disposition of the leads it escalates to sales.
• Higher close rates for marketing-generated leads. Most compelling among our findings is that firms with mature lead management processes close a higher percentage of the leads that marketing generates. On average, 47% of B2B marketers say they close less than 4% of all marketing-generated leads or do not even track this metric. But the percentage of leads that result in a sale climbs steadily as firms mature — 35% of mature firms say they close 10% or more leads (see Figure 3-2). What’s even more persuasive is that among the most mature firms, 12 of 18 close 10% or more of their marketing-generated leads.