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If you’re not familiar with the term "last mile problem", you’re more than forgiven, because it’s not a marketing term but a supply chain logistics one.
In retail, despite all of the complexities involved in getting a package shipped to you from a warehouse, often traveling thousands of miles and stopping at multiple depots, the most expensive and problematic piece of that whole process often occurs in the short distance of the local delivery.
And, most B2B marketing programs have something of a "last mile problem" themselves.
B2B marketing is a highly complex function, with brand awareness and influence occurring across hundreds, and even thousands, of touchpoints. The way we turn awareness into action happens in an incredibly interwoven way across time, and it’s anything but a straight line.
Until the leads from all of that effort hit the sales side of the house, that is.
Suddenly, the name of the game is timing and urgency and, as I’ve seen with many B2B clients, we lose an enormous amount of marketing outcomes during the last mile of lead handover and outreach.
But unlike the marketing waste that’s hard to measure, the impact here is clear for all to see.
And, even worse, it’s a problem of our own creation.
How bad is the problem? Well, first let’s consider how important timing is - after just five minutes beyond the form submission, the odds of qualifying a lead drop by 80%.
We’re talking about success and failure happening between literal minutes, and yet, the average response time is an absolutely abysmal 42 hours. To put that into perspective, we are waiting about 500x longer than we should be in order to contact these leads who have come to us during what might be a tiny window of opportunity of them being in-market.
And here’s the kicker, there’s enormous value in simply being first to respond. In fact, some research has shown that 78% of B2B customers purchase from the vendor that responds first.
So, if simply quickly responding to a request to talk to sales can be so impactful, how are we collectively this bad at lead follow up?
Once a lead hits the CRM after filling out a form, a number of technical steps often need to occur, and they are often a result of the inefficiencies that build as GTM organizations grow.
Most of these activities come from a place of good intentions, but ultimately serve the business more than the buyer. So let’s dig into a few to understand why it makes lead follow-up so delayed:
As sales teams grow, so does the complexity of their lead/account ownership. It usually starts off as simply as divisions like SMB vs Enterprise, or EMEA vs APAC vs NA, etc, but as teams and ICP expands there comes a lot of complexity - and politics.
Suddenly, that lead based in France but working for a company based in Canada has to go through some internal decision making about who’ll get credit before anyone reaches out. Or how about the lead who moved companies and reached out to a rep, but now works in a different company size that crosses into Enterprise.
The ownership becomes messy, and the conversations required to follow up with the lead cost crucial time.
The downside to organic form fills is the lack of quality control until after the submission comes in - even with form restrictions and requirements, there will always be a spread when it comes to quality. And, despite our best marketing and targeting efforts, there will always be unqualified leads coming through.
Sales leadership, rightfully so, want to defend their reps’ time from sifting through noise, and marketing automation comes in as the data white knight. But, this process is not without problems. I see countless situations of human error, where putting an “AND” where there should be an “OR” causes leads to fall through the cracks and never even get seen, much less quickly reached out to.
The same happens on the data side. Even great data enrichment tools miss from time to time, and I’ve seen no shortage of cases where a $1bn company never passed through the filter because something went wrong and they were deemed a >$1m org that hit disqualification rules.
Often, these mistakes are caught by diligent teams, but the time lost in that effort can be the very thing that loses the win.
B2B marketing became a big volume game over the years, where execs expect to see hundreds of MQLs on marketing’s dashboard even though the actual hand raises may only number in the dozens. All of these other loosely defined MQLs often end up distracting teams from the ones that really count.
A lack of clear prioritization of hand-raisers causes teams to often miss the ones that really matter while dealing with low-intent leads that go nowhere. But, there’s also another byproduct of this volume - complacency.
When teams are seeing volumes of what look like great leads, even demo requests that were not organic but driven by paid efforts (including incentivized ones), it creates an atmosphere of abundance, where sales teams won’t follow up with leads with the hunger that they would if the true scarcity of high-intent leads was visible. Even when they are really short of pipeline, this behavior of “I’ll do better on the next one” is hard to shake.
These organizational problems are not easy ones to solve (although many of them can easily be with Chili Piper!), and even the most damning industry stats about speed to lead can still hit the immovable object that is company politics.
There is a tactic, however, that I’ve found really helps to open up a dialog when movement is slow - create proof with data.
One of the clients that Storybook Marketing works with, a large B2B SaaS company, was facing a speed to lead problem. The numbers involved in generating these high-intent leads were substantial:
All of that spend, and effort, resulted in a lost connection with 93% of the high-intent leads that were generated. There were some quality issues such as the messaging that was delivered and the accuracy of the MQL scoring logic, but a substantial amount of the results were because of poor follow-up SLAs.
After running an analysis, the average follow-up time was 17 hours. Ouch!
Internal meetings around SLAs were held, industry articles and stats were shared, but the movement was slow. As we’ve seen in many organizations, the processes of routing were slow to complete because of assignment rules, as well as unenforced SLAs, so we came up with an idea that we could run with from the marketing side.
[Editor’s note: of course the best solution here would be to implement a tool like Chili Piper to automate inbound lead qualification, routing, and meeting booking, but sometimes internal politics get in the way and marketers have to start with a smaller win]
If there was no sales follow-up happening in the immediate minutes that mattered, marketing would send emails to keep the leads warm. But they had another objective, too. They would hopefully showcase just how much engagement was happening in those minutes compared to the 7% that was being seen on the sales side.
So, using their Marketo instance, a simple email was developed, thanking them for submitting, and setting expectations about follow up, as well as links to an interactive demo of the product and key website pages.
That email drove a 52% open rate and a 17% CTR.
We’ve replicated versions of this same email experiment across clients, and the results are consistently north of 50% open rates, with click rates that show an interest and a curiosity. And that delta has helped to create urgency in solving the sales SLA.
It’s one thing to tell GTM teams what they’re potentially missing, and another entirely to show them what they definitely are.
We often obsess too much about conversion rates in marketing, but when it comes to people asking to talk to our sales team, it matters greatly. And, if there’s one that has continued to be true, it’s that the most effective tactic marketing can take to improve conversion rates, closing that speed to lead gap continues to top the list.
Pipeline is in scarce supply for many organizations these days. And getting more of it is no easy feat.
There’s no excuse for dropping the opportunities you’ve actually generated because of an entirely fixable problem. And, on that, it’s important to note that this isn’t a problem for sales to fix alone. It’s a shared issue because the handover is owned by both teams. Marketing needs to make sure that sales is aware of the context of leads finding their way to them, especially when it comes to various intent levels.
Sales can’t realistically follow up on everything with urgency, and marketing needs to play its role in helping the team prioritize - including when it comes to solutions to the problem.
When there is blame on both sides, nobody wins, but when the GTM team acts as one in solving this problem - it gets resolved fast and the company wins together.
It’s tough to stay on top of all the new trends and tactics in B2B marketing.
Subscribe to our spicy newsletter The Sauce to get timely advice from Liam and the smartest marketers I know.
(No spam, promise.) 🧡
If you’re not familiar with the term "last mile problem", you’re more than forgiven, because it’s not a marketing term but a supply chain logistics one.
In retail, despite all of the complexities involved in getting a package shipped to you from a warehouse, often traveling thousands of miles and stopping at multiple depots, the most expensive and problematic piece of that whole process often occurs in the short distance of the local delivery.
And, most B2B marketing programs have something of a "last mile problem" themselves.
B2B marketing is a highly complex function, with brand awareness and influence occurring across hundreds, and even thousands, of touchpoints. The way we turn awareness into action happens in an incredibly interwoven way across time, and it’s anything but a straight line.
Until the leads from all of that effort hit the sales side of the house, that is.
Suddenly, the name of the game is timing and urgency and, as I’ve seen with many B2B clients, we lose an enormous amount of marketing outcomes during the last mile of lead handover and outreach.
But unlike the marketing waste that’s hard to measure, the impact here is clear for all to see.
And, even worse, it’s a problem of our own creation.
How bad is the problem? Well, first let’s consider how important timing is - after just five minutes beyond the form submission, the odds of qualifying a lead drop by 80%.
We’re talking about success and failure happening between literal minutes, and yet, the average response time is an absolutely abysmal 42 hours. To put that into perspective, we are waiting about 500x longer than we should be in order to contact these leads who have come to us during what might be a tiny window of opportunity of them being in-market.
And here’s the kicker, there’s enormous value in simply being first to respond. In fact, some research has shown that 78% of B2B customers purchase from the vendor that responds first.
So, if simply quickly responding to a request to talk to sales can be so impactful, how are we collectively this bad at lead follow up?
Once a lead hits the CRM after filling out a form, a number of technical steps often need to occur, and they are often a result of the inefficiencies that build as GTM organizations grow.
Most of these activities come from a place of good intentions, but ultimately serve the business more than the buyer. So let’s dig into a few to understand why it makes lead follow-up so delayed:
As sales teams grow, so does the complexity of their lead/account ownership. It usually starts off as simply as divisions like SMB vs Enterprise, or EMEA vs APAC vs NA, etc, but as teams and ICP expands there comes a lot of complexity - and politics.
Suddenly, that lead based in France but working for a company based in Canada has to go through some internal decision making about who’ll get credit before anyone reaches out. Or how about the lead who moved companies and reached out to a rep, but now works in a different company size that crosses into Enterprise.
The ownership becomes messy, and the conversations required to follow up with the lead cost crucial time.
The downside to organic form fills is the lack of quality control until after the submission comes in - even with form restrictions and requirements, there will always be a spread when it comes to quality. And, despite our best marketing and targeting efforts, there will always be unqualified leads coming through.
Sales leadership, rightfully so, want to defend their reps’ time from sifting through noise, and marketing automation comes in as the data white knight. But, this process is not without problems. I see countless situations of human error, where putting an “AND” where there should be an “OR” causes leads to fall through the cracks and never even get seen, much less quickly reached out to.
The same happens on the data side. Even great data enrichment tools miss from time to time, and I’ve seen no shortage of cases where a $1bn company never passed through the filter because something went wrong and they were deemed a >$1m org that hit disqualification rules.
Often, these mistakes are caught by diligent teams, but the time lost in that effort can be the very thing that loses the win.
B2B marketing became a big volume game over the years, where execs expect to see hundreds of MQLs on marketing’s dashboard even though the actual hand raises may only number in the dozens. All of these other loosely defined MQLs often end up distracting teams from the ones that really count.
A lack of clear prioritization of hand-raisers causes teams to often miss the ones that really matter while dealing with low-intent leads that go nowhere. But, there’s also another byproduct of this volume - complacency.
When teams are seeing volumes of what look like great leads, even demo requests that were not organic but driven by paid efforts (including incentivized ones), it creates an atmosphere of abundance, where sales teams won’t follow up with leads with the hunger that they would if the true scarcity of high-intent leads was visible. Even when they are really short of pipeline, this behavior of “I’ll do better on the next one” is hard to shake.
These organizational problems are not easy ones to solve (although many of them can easily be with Chili Piper!), and even the most damning industry stats about speed to lead can still hit the immovable object that is company politics.
There is a tactic, however, that I’ve found really helps to open up a dialog when movement is slow - create proof with data.
One of the clients that Storybook Marketing works with, a large B2B SaaS company, was facing a speed to lead problem. The numbers involved in generating these high-intent leads were substantial:
All of that spend, and effort, resulted in a lost connection with 93% of the high-intent leads that were generated. There were some quality issues such as the messaging that was delivered and the accuracy of the MQL scoring logic, but a substantial amount of the results were because of poor follow-up SLAs.
After running an analysis, the average follow-up time was 17 hours. Ouch!
Internal meetings around SLAs were held, industry articles and stats were shared, but the movement was slow. As we’ve seen in many organizations, the processes of routing were slow to complete because of assignment rules, as well as unenforced SLAs, so we came up with an idea that we could run with from the marketing side.
[Editor’s note: of course the best solution here would be to implement a tool like Chili Piper to automate inbound lead qualification, routing, and meeting booking, but sometimes internal politics get in the way and marketers have to start with a smaller win]
If there was no sales follow-up happening in the immediate minutes that mattered, marketing would send emails to keep the leads warm. But they had another objective, too. They would hopefully showcase just how much engagement was happening in those minutes compared to the 7% that was being seen on the sales side.
So, using their Marketo instance, a simple email was developed, thanking them for submitting, and setting expectations about follow up, as well as links to an interactive demo of the product and key website pages.
That email drove a 52% open rate and a 17% CTR.
We’ve replicated versions of this same email experiment across clients, and the results are consistently north of 50% open rates, with click rates that show an interest and a curiosity. And that delta has helped to create urgency in solving the sales SLA.
It’s one thing to tell GTM teams what they’re potentially missing, and another entirely to show them what they definitely are.
We often obsess too much about conversion rates in marketing, but when it comes to people asking to talk to our sales team, it matters greatly. And, if there’s one that has continued to be true, it’s that the most effective tactic marketing can take to improve conversion rates, closing that speed to lead gap continues to top the list.
Pipeline is in scarce supply for many organizations these days. And getting more of it is no easy feat.
There’s no excuse for dropping the opportunities you’ve actually generated because of an entirely fixable problem. And, on that, it’s important to note that this isn’t a problem for sales to fix alone. It’s a shared issue because the handover is owned by both teams. Marketing needs to make sure that sales is aware of the context of leads finding their way to them, especially when it comes to various intent levels.
Sales can’t realistically follow up on everything with urgency, and marketing needs to play its role in helping the team prioritize - including when it comes to solutions to the problem.
When there is blame on both sides, nobody wins, but when the GTM team acts as one in solving this problem - it gets resolved fast and the company wins together.
It’s tough to stay on top of all the new trends and tactics in B2B marketing.
Subscribe to our spicy newsletter The Sauce to get timely advice from Liam and the smartest marketers I know.
(No spam, promise.) 🧡
Liam Moroney is the co-founder of Storybook Marketing a boutique performance marketing agency that combines years of strategic expertise with executional capacity, helping funded startups design, build and manage integrated paid media programs that accelerate their growth.
You can connect with Liam on LinkedIn.
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