A case for lead management - Dick Lee (#2 inseries)

Inquiry generation:

In the BW (before the web) years, a major industry conversation went on over whether the “mail-phone-mail” method of generating inquiries was more or less effective than “phone-mail-phone” and whether either variant was better or worse than injecting field sales at an earlier point. After all the scrapping, the answer was a definitive, “It depends.” But today, in the AW years, the Internet has completely changed the dialogue. Either we’re driving traffic to the web; or relying on search engines to get prospects there; or e-mailing customers where we’d used snail mail; or even—and hang your head in shame if this shoe fits—prospecting over the web via e-mail. Otherwise called, “SPAMMING.”

But you wouldn’t do a thing like that, would you? I guess some would. It’s always amazed me how many marketers cling to what meager returns approaches like spamming generate without ever once considering how much damage they do—as if the major damage doesn’t offset the minimal returns.

It’s all too easy to overwhelm even opt-in customers and prospects with promotional e-mail
I’ve recently read data saying that over 70% of current e-mail traffic is spam—and this percentage will increase to 90% plus in the near-term. So who has time to read this crap? And how does so much clutter affect the inquiry-generating value of spamming? Good thing e-mail messaging is free, ‘cause if there was the slightest per-message charge from ISPs for sending e-mail across the Internet, spam, including B2B inquiry generating spam, would shrink right back into the can.

Hey, if you’re after suckers, spam them. Go ahead. But if you’re generating high dollar potential B2B inquiries, stay the hell away from e-mail except for targeting “opt-in” prospects—and you have to be very careful not to pester opt-in folks with promotional messages, or they’ll immediately add you to their “blocked senders” list. You even have to be careful not to overdo it with informational messages, or they too will wind up on the digital dung heap. This is where most "automated" lead nurturing & lead management packages bite the dust. They sound great up front but automated marketing can be automatically filtered out very easily on the receiving end!

So I’m not going to relate a spam success story—not to mention I’d have a hard time finding one. Instead, we’re going to turn to trusty “old” direct mail for our case.

SUCCESS PROFILE:
A global maker of adhesive materials had been trying unsuccessfully to introduce a new materials category into the automotive assembly process. But these materials were nowhere to be found on any carmaker’s “approved materials” list, thereby thwarting all marketing and sales efforts to date. So the marketing and sales folks had to uncover a new “path to market.”
How did they start? Not by ginning up a lead-generating program right off the bat. Instead, using sales’ knowledge of customers and how the car biz runs, they evaluated each car maker’s purchasing process to find out which might prove least resistant to introducing new materials not on the “approved” list for the assembly process. And lo and behold, they found a candidate—better yet, one of the big three (we used to call them the Big Three before they bumbled their way into lower case status).

Marketing and sales continued developing their inquiry generating strategy by carefully identifying and analyzing: which job categories would be most likely to recommend new adhesive products for assembly; which job categories would make final decisions; plus what the decision-making process would look like. And they also took the critical steps of identifying what personally motivated people at each level and “what hurt,” especially at the recommender level. Knowing what frustrated these potential new product recommenders, who turned out to be mostly low-level engineers, provided the basis for the core marketing message and offer.

Based on this detailed analysis, marketing and sales settled on a mail-phone-direct sales sequence to generate inquiries from these junior engineers. The mailing package offered the opportunity to obtain free technical consultation from one of the seller’s senior engineers—a level of expertise car-makers’ junior engineers rarely even pass in the hallway. The proposed consultations focused on specific applications of the new materials at assembly points where these junior engineers knew they were specifying less-than-ideal stuff, but were constrained by the approved materials list. No better B2B offer—now, in the future or in the past—than providing information to help a prospective customer solve a recognized problem.

The mail drop, staged to avoid causing a sales follow-up bottleneck, targeted but several hundred names. Because of the value attached to the senior engineers’ time, marketing first went for a “hard” response, asking inquirers to agree to a meeting without an option to obtain additional information, and then further qualified inquiries by phone, including scheduling the free consulting sessions. When these sessions occurred, the manufacturer’s senior consultants helped their junior automotive brethren develop cost-benefit and production quality rationales for introducing these new adhesive materials—and even offered to accompany recommenders when they pled their case to higher powers.

Now on to the numbers. Because of the high revenue that a single assembly-line product application would generate, just two new applications in the first year would put the whole initiative, sales costs included, into the black, And with a long sales cycle-time projected, marketing and sales adopted two closes in twelve months as a short-term program goal. This was an easy sell to management because the company was really after the long-term opportunities management believed would open up across multiple car
makers—if they could just crack one target automaker’s approved materials list.

The outcome? At approximately six months out, the number of new assembly-line applications approved and specified passed ten. And before long, the new materials were shipping out by the truck-load. Short-term goal accomplished. Long-term goal achieved.

The moral of this story? In inquiry generation, assiduously avoid “ready-fire-aim.” Do your homework before you pull the trigger. Research, analyze, strategize and plan your implementation through the entire response management cycle—and do it up front.

INQUIRY QUALIFICATION IS UP NEXT: PART 3 of DICK LEE'S "Why not practice sales lead management" based series