Marketing Insights

If your company sells through resellers or a channel, then your process might look something like this:

1. You work hard to bring in high quality leads
2. Your qualification team checks on the leads and sends the best ones on to your resellers
3. A large black hole engulfs the rest of the data in the sales cycle

There are many advantages to selling through channel partners, but one of the biggest downsides for a marketer is the lack of visibility. In order to know which marketing programs to continue, which trade shows to attend, which AdWords to buy, etc. you need to know which leads are resulting in closed deals. Many people have tried to solve this problem (and they’re still trying!), so I’m not going to tackle that black hole.

What I can tackle is a quick check-up on your partners so that you can measure who’s following-through with the leads that you’re sending to them. Here’s how it works:

Approximately a week after your inside team has qualified a lead and sent it to a partner, send a follow-up email to the lead asking them a simple question: “Did our partner get you the information that you needed?” Make it simple for them to respond by offering two links in the email: “Yes, I have what I need” or “No, I’m still waiting on information.”

Ideally, you’re going to want to use a marketing automation system to do this so that you can take it one step farther: a week after sending that email you can check to see who did not respond in any way and send them a second/final email asking again. Now you have three groups of leads: those who haven’t replied, those who are happy, and those who haven’t heard from their assigned partner.

It’s that final group that you’ll want to keep an eye on. It’s time to give them a little attention again from your inside team, then assign them to another partner and get the ball rolling. If you start to see trends in this group – are the same partners failing again and again? – you’ll need to dole out warnings and perhaps even take away partner privileges… I’ll leave that up to you and your organization. On the other side of that coin, keep tabs on the happy group too and consider rewarding (or at least thanking) the high-performing partners.

I’d love to hear from you – have you tried anything like this? What kind of results have you experienced?

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Best practice tells us to ensure alignment between marketing and sales for lead scoring programs.  After all, the sales team is the beneficiary of what marketing implements for lead scoring.  If you have the sales teams’ buy-in, it will make your life as a marketer much easier.

So how can I make sure there is buy-in from sales at the beginning of the process?

One of our customers, Astute Solutions created a lead attribute worksheet they provided their sales team to rank each value to make sure they were part of the process.  They worked with a few key sales people, explained the process and had them complete the worksheet.  Once each had completed with their answers, all the data was aggregated and provided marketing with a definition of what makes a qualified lead to the sales team.

Here are the steps they followed:

• Step 1 – Defined Explicit and Implicit Criteria, for example – Job Function, Webcast Attendee.
• Step 2 – Define Values for each Explicit Criteria, for example – values A – G.
• Step 3 – Choose sales reps to complete the worksheet.  Provide them with the Criteria and Values and ask them to weight each 1-3.  1= Low Value, 2= Moderate Value 3= High Value.
• Step 4 – Aggregate all the sales reps’ answers into one worksheet .  Total the entire score.  The weighted average is the total score divided by how many sales reps involved in the process.  For example Value A for Job Function was 15 Total Score, divided by 5 sales reps = Weighted Average 3.0.
• Step 5 – Based on the Weighted Average, each is High Value, Moderate Value or Low Value.  Now you can use this information to ensure your lead scoring categories and attributes are 100% in alignment with sales’ approach to a qualified lead.

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Today I was reading Sirius Decisions’ latest press release (”SiriusDecisions Benchmark Data Reveals: Best-in-Class Companies Positioning for Better Days“). This sentence stood out to me: “…the firm has found that marketers are changing the make-up of their programs to be closer to field activity, shifting the focus more on clients and current deals.”

It’s interesting to see the reporting data back-up what I’ve been noticing anecdotally. I spend my days guiding Eloqua’s small-medium business customers in their marketing automation projects. One refrain I’ve been hearing over and over is “lead nurturing”. It’s not about lead acquisition right now, it’s about mining the leads you already have, warming them up and getting them ready for sales.

However, it’s definitely time for a shift even further down the lead funnel. Sales cycles are now longer because of the economy and that gives marketing more of a chance to get involved in the sales process.

Alden Cushman, SiriusDecisions’ research director and benchmarking analyst says:  “From discussions with clients we’ve benchmarked, we estimate b-to-b companies are doubling their number of pipeline acceleration programs. Instead of focusing on generating new leads, these programs represent a more effective way for marketing to impact the extended sales cycle by helping to move deals that have stalled in the pipeline. Without question, the economy is driving this trend…”

What Can You Do?

• Re-engage Stalled Opportunities: Consider a short nurturing campaign to all contacts that have been sitting in the same Opportunity stage for more than 30 or 60 days (or whatever makes sense for your business). What can you offer them that will give them a nudge in the right direction? Customer testimonial videos are an excellent choice, or perhaps a “Top 10 things to consider when purchasing a…” checklist.
   
• Nurture the Account: For large deals that involve multiple contacts at one account, think about building a customized landing page for them. You can offer links to the collateral they’ve already seen and maybe some they haven’t yet (add green checkmarks to what they’ve been sent in the past). Be sure to give prominence to the name and number of the sales person for the account. Then add in some exclusive content that is normally only available via a form on your site. This is your chance to show them how well you treat your customers by giving them VIP treatment even before they’re a customer.
   
• Share “Privileged” Information: Maybe it makes sense to show your late-stage prospects a sneak peek of your upcoming product features or new service offerings?
   
• Food for Thought: Do you have a lot of ’stuck’ prospects clustered in a geographic area? Host a breakfast and invite those prospects along with two or three of your current happy customers and let them mingle.

I’d love to hear your ideas! Are you moving down the funnel and focusing less on new leads and more on maturing the leads you already have?

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Photo credit: Slowburn

Most clients start out with a lead bucket and an opportunity bucket.  Marketing works with leads, sales works with opportunities.  However, as you move toward an integrated marketing funnel, it is important to incorporate additional lead stages in the buying cycle. 

A Lead Stage field buckets leads and opportunities into a category to help marketers understand how effective their programs are based on conversion from one stage to another.  It also helps with understanding which group I can include or exclude in a marketing program, based on where they are in the buying cycle. 

Here are the Lead Stage fields we recommend and a description for each:

• Suspect  = list purchase, unknown web visitors, pre-show registration lists, raw names
• Inquiry = prospect raised their hand, responds to a campaign
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)  = meets marketing qualification criteria —- Note: In order to prioritize which MQLs should go to sales, Lead Scoring can be incorporated.  For instance you might  have one MQL with a Lead Rating of A1 and one with a B2.  Both are marketing qualified, but based on Lead Score / Rating they will go to sales as priority or non-priority for follow-up.
• Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) = sales determines the lead meets their acceptance criteria, this lead  is not yet in an active pipeline
• Sales Rejected / Recycled Lead (SRL) = sales determines the leads is not sales ready and recycles this lead back to marketing —- Note: Some organizations opt to have sales change the Lead Status field back to MQL. However, in order to get better reporting and have a dialogue with sales, it might be easier to incorporate this additional Lead Status.
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) = meets specific sales stages and sales converts to Opportunity and adds to their pipeline. —- Note: Typically sales uses sales stages during SQL (e.g. proposal, pricing, negotiation, pending signatures, etc.), usually following a sales methodology.  Marketing can choose to add these to their funnel and report based o the stages as well.
• Customer = purchase 

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There is no question that when sales and marketing work well together, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics: Sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower.” – Harvard Business Review. Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing.

If the company has a great quarter – sales gets the praise. If the company doesn’t meet its targets – marketing didn’t create enough demand. I think we have all heard that one before. But, the reality is that when those teams are aligned culturally and economically, we see peak sales funnel performance. So, what can you do to better align your sales and marketing organizations?

1. Get on the same page. Easier said than done, right? The New Year is a perfect time to look realistically at the perceptions across the two functions. A Relationship Map excercise can help you to identify gaps in perception and prioritize areas for improvement, without pointing fingers. Pick the criteria to rank performance on (messaging, brand awareness, lead volume, lead quality, etc.) and then have the marketing and sales teams rate performance individually. The Harvard Business Review also has a checklist approach for facilitating these conversations to positively align the teams. Also, consider using financial incentives for the marketing function that map to sales objectives for increased natural collaboration.
2. Document lead definitions. Often the disconnect in language and semantics can break down the alignment. Jointly define, document, and widely distribute your organization’s universal stages of the marketing and sales funnel. **Hint: A raw form submission is probably not the same as a sales-ready lead. Brian Carroll’s article Bridge Sales & Marketing Gap With Clear Lead Definitions contains some great tips on how to help improve your organization’s lead definitions.
3. The right information at the right time. Sit down with your sales teams and identify which pieces of information are helpful for them to do their job – and also which information is not. Setting real-time web visitor notifications for a “named account” could really help a field rep determine when that account is showing increased interest and when to take action. An telesales rep responsible for cold calling may benefit from an aggregate unknown web visitor report with a domain lookup. This could highlight an indicator of a potentially interested prospect.
4. Empower them to respond effectively. Providing visibility into a user’s activity is definitely an important place to start – this visibility into a prospect buyer’s digital body language and guide the rep on follow-up approach. The next step, however, is to provide the sales rep with tools and templates that they can easily access, personalize, and report on. This enables marketing to have a voice at the table on what goes out the door, while increasing sales efficiency.

Ultimately, sales and marketing are driving towards the same goal – revenue. Involve both functions at the beginning to define objectives, process, key metrics, etc. Identify what sales needs to be more effective as well as what marketing needs to protect the brand – and provide the right metrics to the right folks. Then, look at how automation can help both functions to not only scale – but deliver a powerful 1-2 punch.

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