B2B Lead Conversion Rates By Channel, October 2014 [CHART]

Unlike many marketing channels, referrals have a steady influence throughout the business-to-business (B2B) sales pipeline, especially when it comes to closing the deal, according to October 2014 research by Implisit. Among nearly 500 US-based Implisit clients, who all used Salesforce.com as their CRM system, 3.63% of leads generated from customer and employee referrals resulted in a sale.

This was more than 2 percentage points above the lead-to-deal conversion rate for second-place websites (1.55%) and No. 3 Facebook, Twitter and other social networks (1.47%). No other channel passed 1%.

Breaking down the sales funnel further, Implisit found that on average, it took 84 days to convert 13% of leads to opportunities. Nearly 25% of leads generated from customer and employee referrals resulted in an opportunity—that is, a prospect who is engaged in an active sales process. This was the second-highest lead-to-opportunity conversion rate, with websites leading here at 31.3%. All other channels studied didn’t break 20%. Third-place webinars saw lead-to-opportunity conversion of 17.8%, with Facebook, Twitter and social networks close behind (17.2%). Though the order was relatively similar to that of lead-to-deal conversion, marketing and advertising (15.3%) ranked higher than paid search (14.3%) and sales generated (13.9%) by this metric. Read the rest at eMarketer.