The Steadily Increasing Goal Value of “Early Stage” Marketing Inquiries

I’ve got a hypothesis that companies will steadily and dramatically begin increasing the derived value of early stage website marketing inquiries. In other words, the same marketer that puts a goal value of $150 for a whitepaper download in google analytics, may very well increase that number overtime. The reason for this is three fold.

Firstly, b2b marketers are rapidly learning and sharing best practices from their peers on everything from getting more quality traffic to using better prequalification techniques on their website. Secondly, the rapid adoption of superior analytics tool makes it easier to tie pipeline dollars back to those inquiries. Thirdly, marketing automation and nurturing tools are beginning to make their way into the ‘mainstream’ of b2b marketing departments and agencies. These things together are making all those neglected and often most valuable early stage inquiries suddenly increasingly valuable as management and sales folks see the real data in terms of actual opportunities that can be harvested with patience and discipline.

How do you set your goal values for your company or client? Do you feel you are under or over estimating these numbers? Would love to hear your take!