An Easy Way to Calculate Your B2B Lead Quota

Here's a crucial question for business-to-business marketers: How many B2B leads do you need to reach your revenue target? The financial penalties for the wrong answer are significant. Too few leads means missed sales revenue, while too many to handle means wasted marketing dollars. Ruth Stevens, who has literally written the Maximizing Lead Generation book for B2B marketers, provides a simple calculator to avoid risky guesswork. Inputs to the calculation are average revenue quota per sales rep for the target sales period, average revenue per order, percent of revenue self-generated by sales staff without leads (from referrals and existing accounts, for example), and average conversion rate from qualified lead to sale. Those magic numbers can be derived by consulting sales management, finance staff and your own general business experience -- or you need more than a lead calculator to get on track. Just plug in the numbers to figure target leads per rep. Next, back even further up the sales funnel and calculate the number of inquiries needed per qualified lead! For an example of how it works, go to http://biznology.com/2014/04/how-many-leads-do-you-need-to-generate-use-this-simple-calculator/