Marketing Roadmaps

Integrated Sales & Marketing

Leads. leads, leads

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Earlier today, I was working on another post (ie not this one). I spent a bit of time on getting my words just right and so on. It was getting kind of long, so I re-read the post to do some editing. And realized that after a number of paragraphs, I hadn’t gotten to the point, and even worse, it was just ****ing boring. I had shed no new light on my subject, and my post bored me. I can only imagine how dreadfully dull all of you would have found it.

So, you are spared my boring post.

Instead I am going to write about leads! Over the past couple of weeks, a few of my favorite sales/marketing bloggers have written some thoughtful posts about leads. Here’s a sampling:

You know you’ve read a good post when it REALLY gets you thinking, and these three posts, well, they led to this post 🙂

Leads are the lifeblood of every business, and the source of more misunderstandings, confusion and strife between sales and marketing teams than just about ANY OTHER issue in the business. And the sad truth is, all it takes to avoid the battles is a well thought out integrated lead program. So why don’t more companies do this? Quite a while ago, I suggested some reasons why this is so, and promised to go into more detail in a follow-up post.

Well, two months later, here we are. As clearly as I can, without a whiteboard and visual aids, I am going to give you a model for lead rating and nurturing that delivers the filtered leads (without the crap) that Brian and Dana referred to in their posts. And will end the sales/marketing war….

First Step: Definitions and Responsibilities.  It is marketing’s job to identify, qualify and nurture sales prospects to the point where the prospect becomes a sales lead. Sales then takes over and is responsible for converting the lead into a sale. So you say! Seems simple, how come we have so much confusion?

Diagnosis:

  • We don’t have a clear, unambiguous, agreed definition of PROSPECT and LEAD.
  • We don’t have a clearly defined "hand-off" point. Things shift around depending on how busy the sales team is or how much budget is available for telemarketing this quarter.
  • We don’t have a clear, tested process for nurturing leads, from mild interest to avid adopter. So, it is feast or famine for the sales team, depending on how well a particular lead gen program did this week in generating folks that are ready to buy.

Second Step: Stop doing all that bad stuff in my diagnosis. Instead:

  1. Implement a lead rating system. Your sales and marketing teams KNOW how to define a qualified lead and a qualified prospect. Put them together and have them develop a lead rating system that can be applied to all incoming prospects. The lead rating should be based on three basic parameters, although it may require more than three questions to accurately define this for your business.

    Some people like the MAN model, Money – Authority – Need. I prefer Budget – Timeframe – Decisionmaker (Need is assumed by the fact that the prospect responded to an offer, and the more important dimension to surface is the Timeframe of the purchase.) 

    But it doesn’t matter which of these you prefer – pick one and develop the lead rating questions for your business that will let you classify your prospects appropriately.

  2. Build a mathematical model that classifies leads as A, B, C and D based on your important parameters. Using my preferred Budget, Timeframe, Decisionmaker model, A leads are the hot leads, with budget, immediate timeframe, and the prospect is the decisionmaker. B leads typically have a longer timeframe.

    C and D are prospects — they typically are missing some key ingredient in the mix, or have a much longer timeframe. And they shouldn’t go to your sales people. Cs and Ds should be nurtured in marketing.

    There is a lot of detail in this process, more than I want to go into here. If you are interested, please feel free to drop me an e-mail at sgetgood@getgood.com. I’d love to talk leads with you.

  3. Use your model to assign A and B leads to sales people, and C and D prospects to marketing. Sales focuses on converting hot lead to sales and marketing works on nurturing longer term prospects into leads.

Step Three: Nurture prospects. This is where companies usually miss. They may do the work of classifying leads, but they don’t assign the responsibilities appropriately. Everything goes to sales, even the folks who aren’t ready to buy. Somehow, the company imagines that all the prospect needs is to talk to our excellent sales reps and they’ll cut the PO. Wrong. In fact, it may do more damage to put a prospect in the sales queue. If all you want is to start the conversation, you really don’t want someone trying to close you.

Depending on your product set, you could have a simple or complex lead nurturing process. The key: make sure your prospect is engaged by, and engaging with, the appropriate folks in your sales/marketing team at the appropriate points in the sales cycle.

Leads to sales, prospects to marketing, clear definitions, and a clear handoff point.

Much better than bitching about lead quality or bad conversion rates, isn’t it?

Weekly round-up

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Just a few things still in my "to write about" box for this week.

Great post on Brian Carroll’s B2B Lead Generation Blog: Tips for better webinars. His advice is terrific. Two key takeaways:

  1. Webinars and webcasts are part of the overall marketing strategy, not standalone events. They work well when they are integrated with the program, not when seen as some sort of quick fix to a lead generation problem.
  2. Web events are great for prospecting, lead nurturing and building an expert reputation for your firm. They are NOT a source of hot leads that will close tomorrow, so set the right expectation for your sales team.

Part 7 of Christopher Carfi’s Business Blogging Field Guide, the CEO Blog. Be sure to go back and read the whole series, very well done.

Lastly, congratulations, Ellen MacArthur: Englishwoman Sails Globe in 71 Days, a Record

Manage and Measure Customers from Suspect to Sale, and beyond… from day one.

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The most valuable tool for your VP of Sales and VP of Marketing is a clear understanding of the RESULTS. And it MUST be a connected system – you need to know which marketing programs delivered your sales and which ones flopped. It does you absolutely no good if the systems are disconnected. If your marketing team can tell you which programs delivered leads, but can’t connect to sales revenue and profitability, you do not have what you need. If your web marketing team can tell you how many visitors requested your free trial, but you can’t link the request to an eventual sale, or lost sale, you do not have what you need. If you have great sales reports that show the geographical spread of your sales, or user size or whatever other metric you like, but you don’t know the source of the lead, you do not have what you need. And quite frankly, many small to mid sized companies have exactly that. They don’t have what they need.

How does this happen? In my experience, and I don’t claim to have the only possible experience here, this is what happens.

In the early days of the company, it’s all about making those critical first sales. The company may not even have a marketing function, and if it does, odds are it is pretty tactical in the early days even if there is a strong marketing person on board. There is just too much to do.

Then one day somebody says, let’s put on a show. No seriously, Andy Hardy notwithstanding (if you don’t know who that is, ask your parent or grandparent, or look it up on the web, search word Mickey Rooney), pretty soon everyone realizes the company needs some sort of contact management system. So they go out and buy a decent contact manager like GoldMine or Act. So far so good right? WRONG.

In my opinion, this is where the hidden data mistake starts.

The system works pretty well, and sales people become more productive. Marketing is able to get some customer and prospect data out of the system, so they have a better idea of the lead flow. Everyone’s happy.

So, the company takes the fateful step. It decides to use the same database for customer support. But the database needs a few extra things, so the support needs are tacked onto the sales database. Sometimes using custom programming, and definitely stretching the capabilities of the contact management system. Soon enough the whole thing gets bloated with fields and keys and whatnot for every possible permutation of prospect and customer. Eventually, the system ends up meeting no one’s needs particularly well and definitely making everyone miserable.

If all this happened really quickly, there would be no harm done. You’d say, mistake made, let’s move on. Unfortunately, from beginning to the day the company realizes that all its data is stuck in an over-taxed contact manager typically takes a couple years. By which time so much operational data and corporate history is stored in the system, the thought of replacing it with something else is overwhelming. Even though no one is really getting what they need.

So what’s the alternative?

Here’s the scenario I’d like to see. The very minute someone says, let’s get a contact manager, step back and analyze your company’s current and future sales, marketing, support and operational data needs. Do the hard work of identifying the processes your business will need as it grows. If you can, make the investment in a CRM system that will meet your needs immediately. If you can’t make the strategic investment right away, put it in the plan. And do it as soon as you can find the cash.

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. Managing your relationships with them is too important to be left to chance. Or stuck in an outdated contact management system.

Next up: lead ratings, and how they both power, and empower, your sales and marketing.

Lead Nurturing

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Great article on Marketing Profs about lead nurturing —  Lead Nurturing: Ripening the Right Bananas, by Brian Carroll. Carroll discusses an approach to leads that I have long advocated: Suspects and prospects must be nurtured in marketing until they are ready for a sales person to close them. I truly believe every company should take this approach, from day one if possible, and having a cooperating sales and marketing team is what makes it really work.

The other two things that really  make lead nurturing hum are Lead Ratings and Metrics. More on that next week.

And now for something completely different…. Sales & Marketing Strategy

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In my last few columns, I have talked a lot about blogging and its potential as a marketing and communications tool. For the next few weeks, I am going to turn to a much more “traditional” set of marketing topics, aimed mostly at small to mid size companies in their early stage/start-up, or spin-outs of larger companies with brand new, possibly revolutionary products.

The main theme of our discussion is how the marketing decisions you’ll make today define your future possibilities and will eventually drive, for good or ill, the decisions the company makes two … five… and if it is lucky, 10 years from now.

The positive abstract of this is: 10 marketing decisions you can make today, and make your future. The negative (think Ebenezer Scrooge) is: the 10 things you’ll wish you did two or three years from now. You decide 🙂

Our first topic: Integrated Sales and Marketing strategy focused on Sales Opportunities. Marketing is more than just generating leads and Sales is more than just getting a purchase order. Yet there is a tendency to reduce them to these functions, with marketing’s box at the front of the sales cycle, followed by some hand-off point, where it becomes a sales lead and thus the province of the Sales Department. Eventually no matter how close the two teams were when it was just one marketing guy and one sales gal, the two departments develop into fiefdoms with little or no MEANINGFUL communication about the task at hand. This dynamic is hard to change once it gets a stranglehold on your teams, so prevent it. How? Here’s my prescription

  1. Make dead sure that Sales and Marketing are EQUAL functions in your organization, and that everybody supports this from the CEO on down. Yes, of course, in the early days, Sales will be more critical than the longer term view represented by Marketing. If you don’t get the sales, there is no long term 🙂

    However, even as the sales are rolling in, your brand is being defined and not simply by what YOU say and do – customers, prospects, the general public, etc. all influence the brand. So, don’t wait too long before you take charge of your brand’s future. That’s the Marketing job. 

    What happens if you don’t have balance? If the Sales perspective is the sole perspective, your business strategy becomes a series of reactive, 6-month sales plans. And the reverse, if you focus too much on brand and long term strategy, and not enough on sales, you probably won’t have as many sales. In the early days, this could mean the success or failure of your business.

    You need both functions, in balance.

  2. Insist that your Sales head and your Marketing head work as a team to develop the business plan. Make certain that this does not end up with one function driving the plan and informing the other of what it intends. See warning above about lack of balance between the two functions. Develop an integrated sales and marketing plan with input from BOTH organizations, and not just at the top level.
  3. Develop a mantra that informs everyone that Business Opportunities belong to and are the responsibility of EVERYONE in the company. Everyone is a lead generator, evangelist, sales person, customer service representative; it’s just that each of us has our specialties and specific day to-to responsibilities for which we are compensated.   
  4. Resist resist resist the temptation: when business is good, and the orders and leads are flowing in, it is very easy to let the Sales Department degenerate into an order taking machine and to allow the Marketing Department to morph into a lead generation/sales support organization. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN. You need the maintain a high quality sales organization that is capable of feeding itself and closing business… even when it becomes harder as you move through the product lifecycle. You must have a marketing organization that is capable of thinking long term about the future needs of future and untapped markets as well as feeding the current machine.

I cannot guarantee that your business will be successful if you do this – there’s a lot more to it than just having a well oiled sales and marketing machine. However, I truly believe that you create a far stronger foundation for success with integrated and balanced sales and marketing teams that work as colleagues, instead of viewing each other as competitors.