Lead Management: The 1st Step to Maximizing your Marketing Dollars

Marketing departments are tasked with many things throughout the year.  The hiring of good talent, keeping quality employees, choosing the right communications strategy, improving ROI, and generating higher quality leads for Sales.  With increasing competition and diminishing budgets, achieving these goals is becoming increasingly difficult.  Fortunately, there is a crucial step that marketing departments can undertake that positively impacts the outcome of their initiatives for the year, deploying an effective Lead Management process.  

I'm not a big fan of sports analogies but I recently heard one I think would help put this into context.  Think of an NFL quarterback...say Dan Mario, who holds over 25 NFL passing records.  Over his career, Dan completed 4,967 passes to over 30 different receivers.  Many would say his success was due to his tremendous talent and work ethic, and that would be true.  However, Dan's success was also largely contingent on his receivers' ability to be in the right place, at the right time, and catch those passes.  Without those receivers, many of those 4,967 would have been incomplete.  The same can be said for today's Marketing and Sales departments.

In a recent Gartner study:

"Up to 70% of sales leads are not properly leveraged or are completely ignored, thus wasting marketing program dollars."

If Marketing is the quarterback and Sales are the receiver, why is the process not more closely examined PRIOR to the development of a lead generation program designed to drive meaningful results?  Unfortunately, this is not an isolated event.  In my professional experience, I estimate that over half of all business-to-business organizations have a sub-optimal or non-existent lead management process.  Surprisingly, this reality is prevalent regardless of the size of an organization, be it $500,000 or $500 million in revenue. 

How can you identify whether an effective lead management process can improve your bottom line?  Ask yourself these questions about your marketing and sales departments:

1.    Is there a consensus from sales and marketing to what a "qualified" lead is?
2.    Does Sales complain about (or neglect) the leads they receive?
3.    Can you confirm that Sales have followed up with each lead they receive?
4.    Is there a process in place for Sales to provide feedback to Marketing?
6.    What combination of touches provides the most effective leads for Sales?
7.    Is there a mechanism for Sales to pass leads back to marketing for further nurturing?

Outlined below are five (5) of the most common ways companies can improve their lead management.

#1:  Communication, Communication, Communication!

#2:  Consensus!
There is little value to a Marketing generated  "hot lead" if Sales views it as a "cold unqualified lead" and declines to follow up.  In order to optimize your lead generation initiatives, Sales and Marketing must agree on:

1.    The formal definition of a qualified lead
2.    When and how leads will be transferred to Sales
3.    How quickly Sales will engage qualified leads
4.    What type of feedback Sales will provide marketing on leads
5.    What type of metrics Marketing will give to Sales on efficacy of campaigns

#3:  Know the Sales Process!
In most effective Sales organizations, the salesforce adheres to a standard set of practices that pertains to 1) sales stages, 2) training, 3) forecasting, 4) quota, 5) bonuses, 6) activity levels and 7) how they pursue and generate leads.  A considerable amount of time is spent training and developing these sale processes, yet the Marketing department rarely has a firm grasp on how or why salespeople perform their duties.  Yet, without this knowledge, how can marketers possibly expect Sales to take them (or their leads) seriously?  Ask yourself, when is the last time a member of your marketing team has been seen in the "sales pit" or on sales calls?  If you can't remember...it's been too long. 

#4:  Develop and implement a lead scoring system.
Frequently marketers classify leads as "A, B and C leads."  Unfortunately, all Sales hears is "A and F leads."  As a result up to 70% of leads are ignored.  And while this system of lead classification may work marginally on smaller ticket items with short sales cycles, what if your sales process is 6, 9 even 12 months or longer?  What happens if an "A lead" is transferred to Sales and they are not ready to buy for 12 - 18 months? Does this lead automatically become a "F lead" and is callously discarded, even though the prospect will most likely buy in the future?   The development of a lead scoring system that takes into account 1) your average transaction size, 2) sales cycle length, 3) how your sales people are measured and 4) how Sales treats delayed opportunities will help alleviate this challenge.  

#5:  Nurture leads not ready for sales!
Below you will see a general template of an optimal lead generation process, which we refer to as The "RubiconWay". It incorporates the previously mentioned elements and a Lead Nurturing cycle.  The nurturing of leads takes place both prior to and post salesforce engagement.  Prior to salesforce engagement, leads are engaged via multi-touch campaigns until their score is high enough to be handed over as qualified opportunities.  If a qualified opportunity is not ready to immediately buy within a designated timeframe, the lead is handed back to Marketing to be further nurtured and measured against a lead scoring system that takes into account the purchase timeframe variables.

By implementing these key strategies, your marketing organization will be well on its way to optimizing lead generation, maximizing sales revenue and improving marketing results.  In the next edition of "The LeadGeneration," we will discuss emerging communication and lead generation and management strategies for online leads.

For more information on lead management, please visit www.rubiconway.com or e-mail me at robert.moreau@rubiconway.com. 

Robert J. Moreau
EVP Sales & Marketing
Rubicon Marketing Group, Inc.