A case for lead management - Dick Lee (series)

For the next several weeks I will be leveraging a wonderful paper my company commissioned Dick Lee, Principal of High Yield Methods, to write. While I have made some modifications and added insight the major principles and text are from his paper. That said, here we go, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did!

A CASE FOR LEAD MANAGEMENT -

To the uninitiated, providing effective sales lead management seems daunting—almost too much to ask. And to the already initiated? The reality is worse than the perception. Rather than just “seem” difficult, lead management is difficult, causing many companies throw up their hands in despair and let poorly managed sales lead programs continue wasting money and sales time both. “Hey, most marketing money goes to waste anyway, and all sales people are overpaid and underachieving—so why worry about it?” Or, “Let’s just get an online CRM system and be done with it.”

Claims that MARKETING AUTOMATION, CRM, AND SFA software substitutes for lead management are lies we want to believe!

Despite the short shrift given lead management, I refuse to consider it a lost cause. Lead management is far too big a revenue and profitability driver to leave underutilized. And I even more emphatically refuse to let the slight of tongue tricks of CRM software salespeople stand unchallenged. “Lead management? Don’t worry. Buying our software will take care of it.” Lead management is about people doing hard work at often unglamorous tasks. CRM software merely lightens the load. And if you lack the human resources for inquiry qualification, inquiry fulfillment, nurture marketing and the like—buying CRM software doesn’t do squat to support critical lead management functions.

Unlike too many CRM software “success” stories, lead management successes have real numbers behind them. So, to be constructive, how about we try encouraging more lead management activity by sharing with sales and marketing managers a few tools of the trade? Hopefully, we’ll make mounting an effective lead management program look less daunting. Oh, you think I’m being an incurable optimist? I’ll argue the point, especially when we have successful, data-based lead management success stories to relate—as opposed to the fuzzy “success” stories too often surrounding CRM software implementations.

Okay, I am somewhat of an optimist. But here goes anyway.

Lead management frees up far more labor than it consumes, but still leaves marketing short-handed. While effective lead management creates labor savings in field selling that dwarf the labor marketing consumes across the lead management activity spectrum, the sales force labor saved does not convert into the additional bodies marketing needs for: front-end analytics; inquiry generation; inquiry qualification; nurture marketing; and tracking and back-end analytics. Instead, sales labor savings convert into more quality sales time available to sell more product and generate more revenue. Besides, even if increased selling efficiencies did free up sales labor for reassignment to marketing—would marketing really trust sales types doing any aspect of lead management? No more than sales would trust marketing to sell. Further, even marketing people typically lack the discipline and mindset required for most lead management functions.
But we’ll come back to staffing issues later. In the meantime, let’s review tools and techniques that help make each aspect of sales lead management boost sales revenues.
Front-end analytics: Within a lead-generation program, front-end analytics provide the radar that guides your message to your qualified targets—rather than causing “collateral damage” by landing everywhere except on target. Moreover, front-end analytics help you find the message that will best motivate prospective customers. And haven’t we all been on the receiving end of e-mail, direct mail and telemarketing messages that scream, “Not only don’t I know who you are, I’m clueless about what you want?”
Fortunately, some precision-targeted programs do hit their mark—communicating, “I know you, and I know how to help you”—including one program developed by a mega-FI (financial institution) with above average customer sensitivity........THE REST TO COME.