Improve Demand/Lead Generation, Handling and Follow-Up

Good demand/lead generation is a continuous process that involves targeted messages and campaign management, response management, lead qualification, sales inclusion and customer relationship-building and retention.

Revenues have been the primary measure of sales performance and still are. For marketing departments, the number of leads generated has often been used as the key metric. This can result in an emphasis on simply increasing the sheer number of leads from a marketing effort. This may also result in frustration for sales teams because of the perception that marketing-generated leads may not be fully qualified.

A number of business analysts visualize the process of lead generation and how that results in sales, like a funnel with holes along its sides that represent “leaks.” Lead and demand generation activities by marketing departments fall into the funnel at the top. Because of the increased use of a wide variety of interest-generating media, such as telemarketing, the internet, and social media channels, leads are often more challenging to qualify. Often the number of leads generated is larger and the leads are in various states of qualification.

However, along the length of the funnel, leads leak out for several reasons, such as:

• Poor qualification methods
• The time leads are in the funnel, which can cause a “warm” lead to go “cold”
• Limited follow-up by sales

The result is that between 40% and 80% of the original leads may be lost before they arrive at the end of the funnel, where they may appear as sales opportunities.

How to prevent the loss of sales leads

To prevent the loss of leads, it may be useful to ask the following:

• What is meant by a “qualified” lead, and do both sales and marketing agree on the definition? Sales often expresses skepticism about the quality and “warmth” of the leads generated by marketing campaigns. Concurrently, marketing is often skeptical about sales reps’ ability to translate all the leads generated into actual sales. Technological systems like the one we use—Eloqua help to standardize and automate some parts of the process and should improve agreement and the ability of these two groups to collaborate.
• How are marketing campaigns evaluated so they can be continued or changed to make them more successful? The number of leads alone is not usually a good metric, as mentioned above, and now technology is available that can track campaign performance based on qualified leads and other metrics.
• Is there a process in place for providing the prospect’s interests to sales reps before they make the follow-up call? One way of looking at ongoing communications to collect such information is called “drip-marketing.” It involves the use of a variety of media to connect with the prospect in a personal, regular and consistent way. It requires technologies and processes, strategies to ensure privacy and compliance, and ongoing testing and measurement to determine effectiveness.

Addressing these sorts of questions basically results in the insertion of another layer in the process of marketing’s discovery of prospects and handing them off to sales. A means of qualifying the leads now occurs before the hand-off, providing sales with both names and intelligence about them and a much “warmer” prospect than before.

Courtesy – Jay Mckveer