The Marketing Black Hole: Where 70% of Leads Go to Die
The mythical black hole sits in the middle of your funnel and sucks in good leads that are never seen or heard from again. I see this often with leads that are MQLed too early.
A few examples: the lead that's automatically MQLed because they completed a web form to talk to sales. Or the lead that attended a webinar, a field event, or requested a demo. These seemingly high-intent leads are handed off to sales and forgotten by marketing.
Sales tries reaching out, but most of them aren't ready and don't respond. So they get dropped into an automated sequence and sales hopes for the best. After several weeks of generic emails with no response, sales moves on. Marketing rarely follows up.
Where Good Leads Go Bad
Why does this happen? In my experience, it's because of bad processes built to compensate for bad systems.
When marketing hands an MQL to sales, they stop tracking it. In the orgs I was a part of, the process was to give complete control to sales. We didn't want the customer getting emails from both sales and marketing teams — to the customer, we'd look uncoordinated and unprofessional. So we relied on sales to own the customer communications.
The Handoff Hazard
In theory, once sales exhausted their efforts, they were supposed to hand these leads back to marketing to continue nurturing them. But sales often forgot to reassign them. And if they didn't forget, marketing didn't have enough context to know what to do next.
This is how the black hole happens. Sales has forgotten about these leads thinking they were never qualified. Marketing does nothing because it's easier to generate new leads.
Meanwhile, the lead is looking at more content on the website, downloading case studies, viewing videos — and no one knows.
System Shortcomings
The bad process is a symptom of bad systems. The reason our marketing team abdicated responsibility to sales was because we couldn't see into their systems, and they couldn't see into ours.
As a marketer, I didn't know if a lead was already in an Outreach sequence because I didn't have access to that system. I also didn't know if the lead had responded to one of those emails and had already scheduled a meeting.
Even if I had visibility into those systems, I wanted to make sure marketing was sending relevant messages. The sales person had the best context for what the lead needed. I tried checking the notes in Salesforce after a meeting happened. Sadly, many of the sales reps I worked with weren't good at documenting. So I found myself listening to Gong calls to understand the status of a deal.
This wasn't scalable. I didn't have time to keep track of what was happening with a lead. It required me to go to too many systems and look at too much data.
The New Era for CMOs
The future is going to look very different because the systems are getting better. In particular, I'm excited about generative AI technologies and the data warehouse.
The data warehouse from companies like Snowflake will allow me to see everything that's happening to a lead across all systems in one place. This makes it easier to know if it's safe to market to a lead.
Generative AI will allow me to truly understand what's been said. I can pass the contents of an email or the records of a Salesforce instance and have it summarized. The data warehouse gives me visibility, and genAI gives me context.
The CMOs of the future will step into the black hole and actively market to these leads.
