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.
Two encouraging lead generation trends were reported in a July 16 blog by Barry Trailer, managing partner at CSO Insights, in which he announced the availability of CSO Insight’s 2010 Lead Generation Optimization Report based on surveys of over 600 companies (1/3 in technology, 1/3 in services and 1/3 in manufacturing / non-tech / other).
Two findings are particularly great news: nearly three-quarters of surveyed firms are increasing their marketing budgets, and the number of firms tracking marketing ROI has reached a new high watermark.
Regarding marketing budgets, Barry referenced survey findings to compare last year to this year:
2009
“Sixty-seven percent had frozen or reduced their marketing budgets.”
2010
“Seventy-two percent of firms are increasing their marketing budgets.”
It’s good to see this type of movement in best marketing strategies to increase sales: away from cutting costs and toward marketing investment.
Barry also commented on the increase in companies tracking marketing ROI:
“For the first time in the seven years of this report, a slim majority (51%) of firms responding now track the ROI of their marketing campaigns.”
He added that the top three metrics used for evaluating lead generation programs were number of leads per campaign, number of leads converting to sales opportunities and revenue closed from opportunities.
It’s also good to see movement in marketing measurement best practices: away from cost per lead and toward a focus on conversion rates and ultimate revenue generated.
I’d be interested to hear what’s happening at your company around this dynamic duo of lead generation, marketing investment on the front end and marketing measurement on the back end.
If you want to stir emotion in a marketing VP, bring up the subject of lead follow up. Few subjects can rile like that one. Leads that are discounted, not accepted or simply ignored can cause otherwise cool-headed marketing execs to pull out their hair, especially after having worked so hard to generate them in the first place.
Having been in the business of helping B2B companies close the gap between marketing and sales for almost 20 years, and talking to execs from both sides, I could spend hours talking about why it happens. There's a lot of psychology involved—fear of failure on the part of sales, for one thing. Preconditioning also plays a role if sales is used to receiving volumes of raw, unfiltered leads that simply take too much time to cull through.
My advice? Marketing needs to take on the role of qualifying leads. All those targets who've raise their hands—signing up for webinars, downloading your white papers, clicking through on an email—need to be quickly qualified. I suggest you make that your job.
Then, only pass through the real opportunities. Instead of giving sales 100 tradeshow presentation attendees, give them the 10 that are in a position to buy.
Whether you call it lead qualification, lead management, response management, or, as PointClear does, lead development, find an easy and efficient way to do it within days of generating the lead.
Heed this tip and you can make sales more productive, show a more impressive marketing ROI, and help make your company more successful.
Of course we're biased here at PointClear, but we're proud of an article recently published in Selling Power magazine. Called Lists, Leads, and a Ladder to Success, the article details long-term PointClear client CenterBeam's experience with outsourced prospect development. Here's a summary:
Looking for qualified leads for the managed IT services that CenterBeam provides to midmarket companies, Sales and Marketing EVP and CMO Karen Hayward opted to outsource.
"We knew the only way to get CFOs in a targeted, precise fashion is over the telephone," CenterBeam's Hayward said. "We looked at doing it [prospect development] in-house, and it took five minutes to know that was a nonstarter for us."
After a first experience with an outside lead-management firm which Hayward terms "a disaster," CenterBeam chose to partner with PointClear. "Very few have the staff to have business-level conversations with our market," she said of Atlanta-based PointClear.
Karen noted in the article that employing advanced segmentation ... using call flows, not scripts ... relying on college educated, experienced associates ... leveraging multi-touch campaigns ... set PointClear apart in the selection process, and has helped San Jose-based CenterBeam grow steadily at an average rate of 34 percent annually since 2003.
We invite you to download the Selling Power article today.
Post by guest blogger Mike Rogers, Director of Business Development, Customer Effective about PointClear sales leads.
At Customer Effective, we help clients maximize their customer relationships using solutions based exclusively on Microsoft technology. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, we are consultants and solution implementers serving midmarket and enterprise organizations worldwide.
We have been a client of PointClear's for about one year, and were introduced to them by Microsoft. As a young, small and growing company, we are hungry to fill the top of the sales funnel, and we've experimented with all sorts of lead generation approaches. We tried internal marketing campaigns, search engine optimization and hired our own inside sales representative before turning to an outsourced B2B teleservices provider.
I initially based my decision to outsource on personal bandwidth limitations. PointClear provides a full-time equivalent, dedicated prospect developer, as well as a program manager who keeps me up-to-speed, sends pre-meeting updates including recorded calls, fields questions from our team about messaging, and generally helps me to develop an efficient rhythm that allows me to run the rest of my business.
I have personally implemented teleservices campaigns in the past, and I get almost daily calls from other providers. However, our success with PointClear is due to proper on-boarding that includes a meticulous process to train the prospect development team on our background, products and especially the kind of information we need to support sales opportunities.
For each opportunity, we receive not only detailed background information and a specific next step, but also a digital audio file. That is something I have never seen before! The audio files provide very specific context for our sales reps as they engage a potential buyer. Additionally, they help us determine tactics for "re-heats" in situations where some ongoing nurturing is going to be required.
About 25 percent of our qualified opportunities come from PointClear, and we now have enough deals in the pipeline that the ROI on this effort is likely to be superb.