Contact validation, profiling, and pre-qualification Article picked up by SLMA Blog

The title bar will link you to the Sales Lead Management Associations Blog which has posted a revised version of my article on contact validation, profiling, and pre-qualification.

Target account profiling & pre-qualification; Where is my phone?

Some weeks come and go without major or even minor revelations and some weeks have the those exhilarating and sometimes humbling "A-Ha!" moments in them. Those moments that expose a simple truth & basic solution to a problem we have created complex, and often times expensive, solutions for.

This week for me, offered one such A-Ha!. One that is so simple and basic it was too simple a solution to be worthy of my consideration. This may be an A-Ha you realized long ago, but none the less it is a basic solution to an ongoing problem that very few of us seem to put into practice. A basic solution that has been ducked, dodged, and avoided by almost everyone at the front end of lead life-cycle management for the past decade (since about the time much more complex and often costly solutions have become en vogue)

The "A-Ha!": If we want to know if a targeted account and contact is a fit for our products & services we should call them and ask!

B2B sales and/or marketing organizations like to spend little time and less money these days calling (yes actually speaking with) targeted accounts to validate and profile the companies and contacts they are targeting. Worse yet, many of us fool ourselves into thinking someone else, "a 3rd party expert," has figured out the secret to validating & profiling our potential users, influencers, and decision makers for us without actually speaking with them. Assured these 3rd party experts have it figured out we spend 10's of thousands of dollars for the data generated by "3rd party expert's" and their highly sophisticated profiling systems. We essentially "hope" ourselves into believing someone else has come up with the answer. An accurate and targeted master database and set of algorithms which filters on our company's specific user, influencer, and decision maker contacts. Stealing from the title of a book I recently read, "Hope is not a strategy."

My intent here is not dismiss or de-value the services provided by database and list service providers. Their services are a critical component in the process of gathering, and then winnowing down, the potential universe of industries, segments, organizations, divisions, and contacts we as marketers use to determine market size, segmentation, etc.. My "A-Ha" is a rip on those of us, myself included, who have relied on database and list services to deliver results they are not intended to, or capable of, delivering. Specifically, the list and database service providers cannot deliver Contact Validation, Target profiling, and Pre-qualification. We fall into the trap of believing that if a Contact has the title we are targeting, works for the "right" organization, within our targeted industry, and has an annual spend of $X on services we provide that the contact is pre-qualified, is the decision maker, and Sales just needs to call them and start the sales process!

Weather you have come to accept the truth or not, the result is almost always the same when we fall into this trap....Sales, and especially the good sales people, will rarely call a "target account and contact" generated from a list or service provider. In Sales defense, why would they? If they are worth their income they have a strong pipeline, referral network, and incremental revenue opportunities within their existing accounts. Don't get me wrong, sales people are more than open to engaging in new opportunities delivered from marketing. However, marketing delivered opportunities need to be at least as good, or better, in quality than the opportunities sales can, and do, create for themselves. At a bare minimum this means marketing needs to deliver a validated current contact which has been profiled and has been pre-qualified by parameters outlined and defined by the sales organization. I have not found a list or database service that can meet this standard, but we as marketer's continue to send contacts from these lists and database service providers directly to our sales teams.

Why? We won't make a simple phone call and ask some simple questions because we have sophisticated segmentation, profiling, analytics, and algorithms to do this simple work for us!

To be fair, another reason we purchase lists and database services as a replacement for phone based contact validation, profiling, and pre-qualification is the perceived cost delta and ill conceived budget alignment/constraints. What do I mean by ill conceived budget constraints? While a list service may cost $5,000 up front for very good database information on 2500 contacts it may cost $25,000 up-front to speak live with the 2500 contacts to perform validation, profiling, and pre-qualification. The $20,000 delta is a big hit to most campaign marketing budgets and they opt for the less expensive option. Unfortunately, the $20,000 saved in the marketing budget is spent twice over, not including opportunity costs, by the Company's sales force as they now must perform, in a non-process driven fashion, the same steps of contact validation, profiling, and pre-qualification. That is, if they call them at all after finding out the first (5) calls lead to dead ends.

Lead Nurturing; Part 4 in a Series

Well if this is your first visit to the site and your interested in more than lead nurturing which, in and of itself, cannot stand alone or be defined without speaking of the larger lead lifecycle management universe I would suggest starting at the series beginning. If your short on time, don't care about the entire ecosystem have at it and keep reading.......


Part 4 based on a Dick Lee series; Sales lead nurturing: Lots of folks believe that sales lead nurturing (a.k.a. “nurture marketing” or “permission marketing”)—is a relatively recent innovation, a child of the Internet. Wrong. A consultant named Jim Cecil introduced a concept called “drip marketing” back in the 1980s, and that started the movement that’s been gaining traction ever since. Even in the most effective implementations, the concept remains simple. Marketing offers B2B sales prospects—typically not-yet-ready-to-buy prospects—the opportunity to periodically receive information that will help recipients perform their jobs. The “sell aspect” to these materials should be subliminal and focused on establishing prospect preference by demonstrating goodwill. Prospects “opt-in” by agreeing to receive these informational materials. Then marketing develops or selects information of interest and sends it along, hopefully via prospects’ preferred channels. These “drops” or “sends” typically run on a set schedule, but certain market events like introduction of new products or issuance of difficult to interpret government regulations create opportunities for unscheduled communications. Periodically (and gently), marketing checks prospect readiness to purchase—most effectively via telephone, but via e-mail as well. And when prospects approach their actual purchase cycles—or want detailed information that only a rep can provide—marketing issues qualified sales leads to field sales, which does the heavy lifting going forward.
Simple. But, oh, how we screw it up.
It’s hard to practice drip marketing with a fire hose
First we have the yo-yos that trade in the faucet drip for a fire hose—blasting prospects with promotional drivel instead of usable information, until prospects either opt-out or drown. Then we have the advertising agency types that insist on “building the brand” rather than giving prospects usable stuff—all the while pretending that brand reinforcement adds value to customers. Huh? Then we have the anxious sales types that weasel the prospect list out of marketing and go make sales calls on everyone on the list—even though many of these prospects are more than a year away from initiating their purchase cycles, and others will never purchase. These blokes usually pester prospects to death until the besieged targets start ducking and dodging them, then rule them out of consideration. Hey, who wants to do business with pests? Just call the exterminators. And finally, we have the forever stressed out types who can’t ever get around to communicating with prospects at all. Hey, can’t afford to miss any meetings. Boy, does that send a loud and clear message to potential customers—or more properly, ex-potential customers.
But again, some companies do it right. Including my favorite car-seller, Lexus, which does a delicate, tasteful and informative drip on customer heads to maintain the relationship—and subtly implant the notion that no other car make will do.

A successful nurturing program
Lexus (I can mention the company name in this instance because I have my customer hat on, not my consulting cap) has the perfect customer-oriented culture for nurture marketing. Employee respect for the customer, including above-board dealings, sets the stage for “light touch” communication of
various types—ranging from thank-you notes to birthday cards (which I personally dislike, but no matter) to more usable stuff such as service reminders, service discounts, spiffs for referring first-time Lexus buyers, and very plush brochures satisfying customer curiosity over each year’s new models—all the while subtly whetting appetites for a new Lexus. Best of all, dealers (at least our dealer) lets us know that repeat customers are rewarded for their loyalty. And because Lexus dealers hire salespeople cut from the right cloth and pay them above market compensation, their sales reps tend to stay put, relieving customers of having to deal with a different rep with each new car acquisition—and providing the opportunity for relationships to grow.
As a customer you never feel bombarded. But you never feel forgotten, either. And what does Lexus get for its efforts? About the best repeat purchase/lease percentage in the business, if not the best. From the time you leave the lot with a new Lexus, you’re a prospect for your next car replacement. And the dealer starts gently nurturing and further reinforcing the relationship. It works. And I’m not an easy sell.

While a great example of nurture marketing I have to say the folks at Lexus have it easier than most of us. Afer all, who doen't like to daydream about a new car from time to time. For those of us in the B2B space it is more about educating potential clients on solutions, problems, and opportunities that our respective companies can help address. We do not start with a product or service everyone, or potentially anyone, may be interested in learning about because the have a desire or self directed need for what our companies are selling.

Up next, now that we have the nurturing engine going, how do we measure prospect readiness to engage in the selling process? Part 5: Lead Qualification and Rank/Score modeling.

Part 3 in Dick Lee Series: Inquiry Qualification

Inquiry qualification: If lead management has a “holy grail,” inquiry qualification is it. Ironic that it’s so pivotal yet still so rarely performed. While from a lead management standpoint failing to qualify inquiries is indefensible, it’s at least understandable. No other aspect of sales lead management is more labor intensive—and no other aspect requires a skill set less likely to be found in marketing, where lead management customarily resides.
Regrettably, inquiry qualification is virtually always the first cut when companies start fudging on their lead management commitments

Inquiry qualification typically goes out the window first when companies start bailing out of lead management responsibilities. Marketing says, “It’s too expensive,” and “We don’t have staff for it.” Sales says, “We don’t want marketing talking to our customers, even potential customers,” plus “We don’t have time for it.” Unfortunately, throwing qualification overboard is the epitome of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.” A self-inflicted injury with dire financial consequences. But…dispensing with inquiry qualification does allow marketing and sales to point fingers at each other, shifting the blame back and forth so neither has to accept accountability for the lousy lead generating campaign performance. How convenient. And senior managers who could intervene usually go blithely about their business paying no heed to this debacle. After all, aren’t inquiry qualification and lead management as a whole just inconvenient “zits” that don’t merit management’s attention? Too bad senior managers don’t recognize that a marketing budget is a terrible thing to waste. As is scarce sales time.

Fortunately, amidst all the bad examples of inquiry management, or lack thereof, are some shining examples, including an express courier company that took head on the inquiry qualification challenge—and lived to reap bushels of ROI.

A CASE FOR STICKING WITH INQUIRY QUALIFICATION

Historically, this small package carrier hadn’t bothered generating sales leads. The marketing folks knew full well what sales would do with them. But along came a new marketing team charged with revving up sales—and soon. However, despite the “soon” edict, marketing proceeded at a deliberate pace. Before jumping into lead generation, marketing first contracted with a third-party service for comprehensive lead management: receiving 800# inquiries; receiving mail inquiries; tele-qualifying each inquiry and rating its sales potential; fulfilling each inquiry according to sales potential; issuing qualified sales leads to field sales; and tracking sales outcomes.
Among all the lead management aspects marketing put into play when the program launched, inquiry qualification was the deal maker. Following the “let Mikey try it” principal, the sales force as a whole waited for its more adventurous members to try out some of these “supposedly” qualified leads. And to their amazement, they were qualified. And they quickly turned into new business. And before long, new customer revenue numbers were up over 25% in some regions, and almost all reps nationally were willingly participating in the program.

Hey, there’s nothing like issuing quality sales leads to catch sales’ attention. Sales reps are naturally skeptical of sales inquiry quality—and deservedly so, with all the crap that gets forwarded to them. But when you send them only good stuff, visions of commission checks soon dance in their heads. Plus, marketing and sales can finally stop pointing fingers at each other. Even hold hands. Maybe........NEXT UP, Part 4: Sales Lead Nurturing