Here’s a question that crops up more and more frequently.  Forrester B2B marketing clients want to know “What are the average conversion rates for leads to opportunities and opportunities to sales in……?”  You can fill in the blank with:

Industry:   high tech, financial services, healthcare etc.
Tactic:   email marketing, paid search placement, direct mail postcards, etc.
Size:   small businesses, enterprises, firms over $250M in revenue, etc.
Product type:  durable, consumer, high technology, software, etc.
Channel:   direct sales, telesales, distributors, resellers, etc.

And create a tremendous array of opportunities to research.  Opportunities so vast it boggles my mind, and makes me wonder how Forrester might provide this kind of information on a reliable, relevant basis at minimum cost to ourselves and our clients.

In the spirit of exploring this dilemma further, I’d like to hear from our blog readers – B2B in particular – on these two questions:

1) What specific sources of information have you found for these types of benchmarks?  (Go ahead and mention competitors, you won’t hurt my feelings…) And how detailed, or reliable, do these sources need to be?

2) Those of you who have this need yourself, what is the burning issue behind the question? Why do you need this information? Or how would you put it to work?

If you’d rather chat privately about this, send me an email at lramos@forrester.com.

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