The State of Lead Generation in 2013
Salesforce bought ExactTarget for 2.5 billion dollars this year and Oracle's Eloqua deal was still settling in. Marketing automation became table stakes.
Two acquisitions frame how much lead generation changed this year. Oracle closed its roughly $871 million purchase of Eloqua at the end of 2012, and Salesforce followed in March with a $2.5 billion deal for ExactTarget. Big enterprise software companies don’t spend that kind of money on marketing automation platforms unless the demand curve underneath them is steep, and it is: lead generation has shifted decisively from manual list-building and cold outreach toward automated, data-driven nurturing, and businesses that haven’t adapted are noticeably behind by year’s end.
Marketing automation went from specialist tool to expected infrastructure
Platforms like HubSpot, Marketo and the newly-consolidated Eloqua and ExactTarget stopped being something only large enterprises bothered with and became something mid-sized businesses were expected to have some version of. The core capability driving adoption: tracking a lead’s behavior across emails, page visits and content downloads, then scoring and routing that lead automatically instead of relying on a sales rep to manually judge readiness from gut feel.
Gated content became the standard top-of-funnel play
Ebooks, whitepapers and webinars behind an email-capture form are now close to a default tactic for B2B lead generation, reflecting how thoroughly content marketing has been adopted as the mechanism for building a lead database rather than buying one. The businesses doing this well are producing content useful enough that the email trade feels fair to the person giving it up, rather than a thin excuse wrapped around a sales pitch.
Lead scoring tied automation to actual sales priority
Rather than treating every download or form-fill as an equal lead, more businesses this year are assigning scores based on behavior, which pages were visited, how many pieces of content were downloaded, whether the lead opened emails, so sales teams can prioritize who to call first instead of working a flat, unranked list. That shift alone has meaningfully changed how sales and marketing teams talk to each other, since it forces agreement on what a “sales-ready” lead looks like.
LinkedIn became a serious paid channel for B2B
LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates format launched this year, giving B2B marketers a native ad unit inside the feed rather than the sidebar display ads that had been the main option before. For businesses selling to other businesses, this closed a real gap, a way to reach a specific professional audience with content rather than just a banner ad competing for attention against everything else on the page.
What separated the businesses converting more leads
The pattern across the year: businesses that treated automation as a way to personalize and time their outreach better converted more of what they generated. Businesses that treated it purely as a way to send more emails to more people, without relevant content behind each one, mostly generated higher unsubscribe rates instead of more revenue. The technology got a lot more powerful this year. What it amplified was whatever strategy, good or thin, sat underneath it.
More on Marketing Strategy, or browse everything from 2013.
