CRO for B2B lead generation: doom and gloom
October 2019
If the main goal of your website is to produce leads for a sales team to follow up on, your customers are other businesses, and you’re doing Conversion Rate Optimization, my heart goes out to you.
For starters, your customers are not just average consumers. They have specialized knowledge and needs. This means user testing will either be hard to organize, or of limited relevance.
No problem, let’s just leverage your website data instead!
Except, you probably don’t get tens of thousands of conversions a month, the way those lucky ecommerce folks do. The 20, or 250 leads you get each month probably aren’t enough data to obtain statistically significant results from an A/B test - unless the effect is huge.
So you’re dealing with special snowflake ❄️ visitors, and data volume that makes it challenging to run experiments. It might be even worse, though.
If you’re like tons of organizations out there, your marketing metrics don’t match up reliably with the sales team’s source of truth. You might have implementation issues, or an audience full of AdBlock lovers, or you might be counting job applications and support requests as leads.
This noise further buries the already faint signal of actual lead data.
Lastly, if you decide to focus on conversion events that are higher in the funnel, you have to take a leap of faith that these events correlate positively with actual leads. It doesn’t always work out that way!
Given that the odds are stacked against you, should even do CRO?
Absolutely. (Says the guy who sells CRO services 😁.) Later this week I’ll try to cast a ray of sunshine amid all this doom and gloom.