The difference between surviving and thriving in today’s competitive marketplace is often determined by finding untapped revenue sources in lead management processes.
We often see significant revenue potential hidden away in sales and marketing processes that not only aren’t working—they’re actually impeding the ability to generate results. That’s when it’s productive to take a closer look at the larger sales lead management picture.
And how best to do this? One way is to put into play a methodology for assessing current practices and correcting gaps in marketing and sales processes.
While there are many paths to the top of the same higher-revenue mountain, we’ve had good success working with clients on opportunity audits designed to identify current lead generation challenges and grow revenue.
With this approach, we take a deep dive into five areas and extract the information needed to assess sales and marketing process effectiveness. Here are the five areas and samples of a few audit questions:
Discovery—What percentage of this year’s revenue target is expected to originate from marketing activity vs. from sales executives’ individual efforts?
Opportunity Capture—Where are opportunities captured and how are they distributed? What are processes for sales acceptance of marketing generated opportunities, and how are they tracked?
Response Management—When and how are inbound calls, web hits, emails from forms and tradeshow leads handled, and by whom? How is data captured, tracked and measured from both sales and marketing perspectives?
Lead Generation and Lead Qualification—How is the target market identified and segmented? How are multi-media / multi-touch / multi-cycle programs planned and implemented?
Lead Nurturing—How are qualified opportunities handled when they have no immediate interest or don’t respond after expressing initial interest?
Findings are reported both as scores in the five key areas and as benchmarks for comparison with similar companies. Recommendations itemize areas for process improvement.
The bottom line: a formal audit methodology uncovers opportunities that lead to more predictable forecasts and drive revenue to higher levels.
At any given point in time, roughly 5% of your target audience is in the market for your product or solution. So, if you have 1,000 targets, 50 of them are in the market to buy your product or solution—or a competitor's solution, now.
Many companies treat all of their targets exactly the same, marketing to them equally. Smart marketing execs, however, know how to apply relational segmentation to more effectively and efficiently ferret out the 50 and save money to boot.
If your average lead rate is 5%, that means among some segments the rate is as low as 1% and as high as 9%, so figuring out which groups of targets have an average lead rate or higher and focusing your energies on them is the best way to be effective and efficient with short-supply resources.
So how do these marketing execs avoid the shotgun approach and pinpoint the 600 or so targets that will yield the best results? Testing. By SIC code, by size of company, by decision maker level, by annual growth percentage, by geography, by offer, by media ... there's almost no end to the variables you can test to reveal your best prospects, at a fraction of the spend.
Take a look at the chart below and see how relational segmentation can work for you.
Download How Relational Segmentation Techniques Help Achieve Higher Sales at Lower Cost for more in-depth information.
Please join Mac McIntosh and me as we host a webinar on Wednesday, April 28 at 2 p.m. EST. Mac is the President of Mac McIntosh Inc., a leader in B2B marketing consulting. We will be discussing the topic "Webinar Leads Demystified".
During the discussion you will learn how to optimize webinar investments and avoid common mistakes. One of the key mistakes that reduce the return on this marketing investment is sending the entire batch of registrant and/or attendee names over to sales immediately for conversion.
Instead, learn how to maximize the value of these prospects with:
- lead evaluation strategies
- data collection ideas for additional qualification
- nurturing best practices
- tips for perfecting the sales hand-off process
We look forward to sharing this valuable information with you.
For more information and to register, click here.
I'm pleased to announce that Don Gracy and I will host a webinar together on Thursday, March 18 at 2 p.m. EST. I hope you'll join us as we join forces to present actionable ideas and steps to take in your continuing quest to acquire clients. Don is a partner with NewLeaf, a leading sales productivity consulting firm that works with Cisco, IBM, Lilly and CSC, as well as other large, middle-market and entrepreneurial firms, offering results-oriented training and coaching services.
NewLeaf and PointClear have collaborated over the years, and have compiled best practices surrounding the finding and winning of new business. We're anxious to share them with you.
During the webinar, we'll cover:
- A sophisticated approach to segmentation that lets you identify characteristics of the most-likely-to-buy targets in your market—giving you more prospects for less spend.
- Keys to effective deployment of your sales resources—offering you unconventional ways of thinking about deployment that have more to do with the strengths of individuals, and less to do with things like territory demarcations.
- New insights into the drivers of that pesky gap between marketing and sales, and how to close it once and for all.
View the on-demand webinar (no registration required)
How to increase sales—best practices yours free (a $399 value)!
According to the Aberdeen Group, whether a company is trying to move from Laggard to Industry Average, or Industry Average to Best-in-Class, there are specific, proven actions necessary to spur the necessary performance improvements.
For a limited time only, you can download Aberdeen's B2B TeleServices Guide free—a $399 value—and learn the following:
Download B2B TeleServices: The 2009 Buyer's Guide here. (through January 29, 2010):