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

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.

"Nurturing Relationship" not a sales phase in most organizations

My 15 years in B2B sales & marketing started off with 12-weeks of sales training with Eastman Kodak Company. Four years later, following my wedding and the start of my personal relationship nurturing journey, I took a job with Xerox as a High Volume Product Manager. With Kodak's training still fresh in my mind I was off to Xerox University in Virginia for 8 more weeks of arguably the best sales training program on the planet at the time.

In under 5-years time I had spent 20+ weeks being trained to be a super-human sales machine using methods from the premiere training programs of the day, SPIN, Relationship-selling, Major Account Management, etc. etc....I could profile accounts using "blue-sheets", cold call my way into almost any account, handle every objection, and track all my opportunities using activity driven sales stage definitions from a variety of sales methodologies (see below).

SALES STAGES:

1. Prospecting
2. Qualification
3. Requirements gathering
4. Solution Development
5. Proposal presentation
6. Negotiate & Close
7. Recycle and expand

At the time I had everything I needed to be a successful individual contributor and could ask for nothing more.

As is often the case, as a successful individual contributor I was promoted to manage a sales team, then a region, and eventually rose to the ranks of Director, VP of Sales & Marketing, etc. in various organizations. It was not until my responsibilities grew to combine Sales and Marketing that I realized what the best sales training programs, pipeline management systems, CRM tools, etc were missing. No one was tracking, or for that matter even responsible for, strengthening the inactive prospect relationship. In today's marketing lingo we call it Lead Nurturing, Lead Recycling, etc. Whatever you label it none of the sales processes and tools of 5 years ago provided a way to systematically drive and track "strengthening the relationship" with non-active prospects. Even today most of systems and processes organizations employ simply have an option to select "Inactive" in the CRM drop down menu for prospect disposition.

In defense of the sales trainers, sales managers, and sales force automation software firms, sales has been, and always will be, about the here and now. Active, accurate, and full pipelines leading to quarterly sales plan achievement is what it is all about. In defense of marketing; brand, lead generation, and positioning drive the day. What is indefensible is that people like myself, and people much, much, smarter than I, have let "strengthening inactive prospect relationships" fall through the cracks of our multi-million dollar systems, PHD driven processes, and continuous eduction programs.

To use a farming analogy, as sales and marketing leaders we are guilty of spending ever increasing amounts of time, money, and intellectual resources to increase the size of our fields in order to harvest a larger crop YoY. We spend money on better chain saws to clear cut more forest, we spend on new irrigation systems to get water to the new field cut from the forest, and we spend more on equipment and people to ensure we can cover our ever increasing acreage. Unlike real farmers of today, we spend very little of our resources on processes, systems, and technology to increase the yield from our current acreage by strengthening the relationship with the prospects and "lost" opportunities we already have.

Of course many of you reading this with a marketing background/role are now shaking your head at me saying to yourself, "my organization has been investing heavily in the area of lead nurturing, recycling, and profiling to increase our yields." The problem, until Marketing and Sales, together, have defined metric driven success measurements, implemented systematic processes that encompass both organizations, and defined end-to-end operating methodologies to execute prospect strengthening activities you will not succeed. Your intentions to increase yield per acre are there but you are, to go back to farming, like a farmer who has laid down the best quality seed and fertilizer to ensure yield increase but not necessarily selected the right crop to grow based on the market conditions or ensured the irrigation system will work when you need it to.

A quick test to know if you are there? Look in your CRM system with a sales rep at your side and ask him/her to show you the pull down menu for prospect disposition. If they do not have an option to select (STRENGTHENING RELATIONSHIP), (NURTURING), or something very similar your are not. You don't have to go look to know the answer do you? You have a slight variation of the (7) steps listed in the top of this article just as I use to.

Lead Management Process; Inquiry to Sales Ready

Welcome!

This Blog will be dedicated to open discussions and commentary regarding best-practices in the Lead Management Process and Sales/Marketing alignment. My practical findings and experience working in Sales-Marketing for Fortune 500's such as Kodak and Xerox, .bomb start-up's, and mid-cap public companies over the past 12-years had led me to the conclusion tha a great un-tapped potential exists inside most marketing and sales organizations. The alternative to my conclusion is that I simply worked for (5) consistently underperforming organizations in the area of Lead Management, which I believe not to be the case.

For purposes of focus, greatest impact, (and to leverage my knowledge base/experience) this Blog will be focused on the B2B marketplace, where a single lost, ignored, mis-handled lead can cost an organization tens 0f millions of dollars.