Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from MarketingCharts, a Watershed Publishing publication providing up-to-the-minute data and research to marketers.
It takes a substantial amount of persistence to get a qualified appointment with an IT executive, according to a study by LeadJen of lead generation campaigns targeting lists of IT executives over a three-year period from 2011 through 2013.
The study was based on more than 331,000 outreach attempts, resulting in nearly 1,500 qualified appointments with IT professionals.
The analysis indicates that it takes 222 calls or e-mails on average to secure a qualified appointment. That's 31 percent more than the 169 on average it takes to reach marketers in a separate LeadJen survey released in April.
Although the largest share of appointments were the result of the first inbound call, a significant share of appointments were the result of multiple phone calls. Twenty-one percent of appointments were the result of inbound response, 20 percent due to a referral and 15 percent from e-mail.
"Simply reaching an IT executive can be challenging because they tend to be more reclusive," LeadJen said in the report. "For this reason, e-mail and voice-mail play even more important roles. On-target messaging is crucial and sales reps who know the existing technology environment of prospects will be more successful. Specific messaging also helps reps navigate IT's complex title structure, which leads to increased referrals."
The study also provided insights into the best times — best months and time of the day — to prospect IT executives.
Finally, the study reveals that the IT function most likely to respond to lead generation was IT/services (44 percent of qualified appointments), which LeadJen believes is "because they have insight into all IT projects and are an entry point to find the 'real' project owners for technology decisions." That department was followed by directors (30 percent) and managers (27 percent), who together accounted for a majority of appointments when breaking the data down by title.
By c-suite, the chief decision maker "with budget authority" agreeing to an appointment was the CIO, 43 percent; followed by CTO, 27 percent; CEO, 17 percent; CISO (chief information security officer), 8 percent; and COO, 5 percent.