A key metric every marketer should consider is the conversion
rate of raw leads to sales-ready opportunity by type of lead.
Here’s the conversion rate we see here at Marketo for the
last 12 months:

A few comments: Word of Mouth, Partner, and Employee Referral are
leads we can attribute directly to a direct referral; Inbound
Call and Website are “inbound” leads where we may or
may not be able to identify what caused the prospect to seek us
out. Regardless, these are leads that are contacting us because
(a) they’ve heard of us and (b) they want to talk to us about
our products and solutions.

Looking at the data results in an obvious conclusion: leads
generated from word of mouth and other inbound leads convert to
opportunity at a dramatically higher rate than traditional
“demand generation” channels. Any marketer looking at
this conclusion will naturally ask “how can we generate more
of these high quality leads?”

That is exactly where social media marketing comes in. Stay tuned for the next few posts in the series,
where I’ll describe the connection between B2B social media
marketing and inbound lead generation, and share the four ways that social media builds brands and
generates leads.