One of my major deliverables is new customers. People who may buy are called Prospects, when they become interested in the product, we call them a lead, and if they have Budget, Authority, Need, and Desire they are called a Qualified Lead. This is Lead Generation and most clients want to initially focus on this.
Click here to read my discussion on this. The following article is what all my LinkedIn members had to say on this topic.
Click here to find the original question and answer on LinkedIn Answers
The Success Stories series provides case studies from people about what it takes to become successful. Each of us is unique in our goals and aspirations, but we have things in common with others. Through the 10,000,000 people in my LinkedIn network we can share ideas and solutions that will help you achieve your goals. While I don’t always agree with all the comments I receive, I include all that are presented coherently and could help at least one of my readers.
The questions have been slightly edited for grammar and presentation. Comments and Kudos, while always appreciated, have been edited out.
International Management Consultant, CMO/CEO in Fortune 500 companies; Board Director;Founder of successful start-ups
In my experience the main reasons for the failure of tracking are human. With the best system in the world, so much drops into a black hole. I see leads being passed to sales people. Since most do not pan out, and sales people do not get paid to enter data, they do not bother to put that into a CRM system. So, if they close the sale, a month or six months later, they have completely forgotten where it came from and to whom they talked along the way. However, in many companies, it must be completed before the order can be fulfilled. So they simply make it up. As a result leads are all but impossible to match to orders. In many companies, they would never fire or penalize a salesperson for failing to keep accurate records. In a very few they will.
Strategic Business Manager and Sales executive. spiro_vournazos@hotmail.com
The best measure I have found is to limit activity to one at a time and measure the increase in enquiry rate. To work you have to have a stable environment and a known historical flatline. (i.e. enquiry rate with no marketing activity for a comparable period).
Dynamic Marketing Leader – Fluent in Spanish
- Data management by someone other than sales rep. We have inside sales or showroom associates
- compensated for lead sourcing and data capture. It has made a world of difference
- We have promo codes on all our lead generation materials and special URLS, specific phone numbers – YOU name it. Then it comes back to training our people to look for that when someone is responding via another phone number or in person in a showroom.
- We have a marketing specific call center program to track our DRTV, special direct mail pieces.
- This had made a world of difference in our business because in addition to our internal people we have this extended team – that I visit in person 3 times a year to train and integrate into our business.
- We make sales managers OWN the leads. While we do pass them to sales reps – we make managers accountable to them as well and that has also made a difference.
Sales and Marketing Operations Professional
The real challenge is tracking the lead through a complex sales cycle. As multiple people (on both the seller and customer side) get involved in the deal, the ability to determine what exactly was the originating source, what had the greatest impact on the progression of the sales cycle and ultimately determining the cost of marketing for a particular deal (which may result in multiple orders across multiple business units and multiple time frames) becomes more of an art than a quantitative exercise. True Marketing Program ROI is unattainable and anyone who makes decisions about funding a program
solely based on ROI is making this decision without enough information.
Owner, Searching in the Business Development field
I am the person doing the cold calling and the data input. In all my dealings with sales as well as with upper management, the only way to truly measure my success is for me to continue to control the lead all the way through to completion. If I pass along a lead and do not follow up, it will either get lost in the system or crucial information will be lost.
I have worked for a couple of lead generation companies, but nothing truly beats an inside sales/lead generation team that works for the company. You get a higher quality lead, better communication, and better market intelligence overall. The problem is in the time it takes to develop a pipeline.
IDC industry analyst, sales productivity expert. Committed to solving big problems, having fun at work!
There’s usually no one single activity that converts a name into a suspect, or a suspect into a prospect. It’s multiple touches that do this — advertising, seminars, direct mail, etc.
Careful practitioners will find interesting results. A few years ago my team ran a series of events and subsequently found a bump in revenues. What we discovered was that much of the revenue bump came from prospects who had been invited to the events but didn’t show up. We conducted separate follow ups to each group (attendees/registrants-non-attendees) and drove business from each group.
What was surprising was the relatively high close rate of the registrant-non-attendee group. If we hadn’t been tracking this group, we wouldn’t have seen the pattern. Once we saw the pattern, we increased our investment in follow up to that group.
26 years of successfully marketing packaged foods and telecommunications
It involves work with no direct benefit to the people doing it and often outside generated leads are from people with different agendas than your salespeople are interested in.
If any rules of engagement or managerial requirements interfere with the salesperson’s primary responsibility, they tend to game the system to protect their interests, making measurement a work of fiction.
Most CRM lead tracking programs are for management. The salesperson needs to do his or her real job first and then do a data entry chore for management. Make the salesperson’s PC do its fair share of the work and follow the trail. Have the PC send the initial letter, then place a follow-up call on the calendar. Make sure there is a card reader to enter new contacts and have a pop-up screen ask for comments and to schedule next steps. Use the CRM software to dial the phone and ask for results, including a description of the call. If you have sales training, pop-up a screen reminding the Salesperson what to do (goal for the call, for example).
The CRM system should provide an easy portal to help the salesperson do their job. Each prospect for whom there is a next step should appear on the front page of the portal and there should be a one-click to the next step (call, proposal or document, for example).
Management should have their own portal that easily provides the analysis they need easily each time they turn on the web browser.
If the CRM is the easiest path to a sale, then it will be used. If the system is used, then there will be evidence of the activity in the system which can be converted to a measurement system.
Owner, Telepath Consulting Inc.
I have now completed over 125 business development, lead generation programs. I can count on one hand clients that internally tracked the ROI on various lead generation programs from lead to sale. Instead of tracking a lead all the way from inception to sale, we tracked it to the point the sales team engaged. We decided with the client what the qualifications are for a sales ready lead, entered those qualifications into the front end of the CRM we were using, and developed a scoring system for leads based on these criteria. Using what clients tell you is their close rate and Average revenue /sale, you have your ROI.
Director, Sales & Marketing at Piehead Productions LLC
Here is how it works at my company. Campaigns are created in the CRM system to reflect various lead sources (event, email to a list, webinar invitation etc.). The results are tracked to determine what type of source or outreach method actually yields results. Periodic review and reporting out of the CRM system helps us determine which methods are working. This is especially useful to the sales and marketing leadership when it comes time to justify repeating a campaign. Either the campaign succeeds and should be repeated, or it fails but could be fixed with a little tweaking, or it failed and will not be repeated.
Vice President of Sales at AutoLending Network/Great Direct Concepts LLC
Interesting question! I had an article published recently on this in World of Special Finance-Canada and it appeared in F&I magazine and Wards I believe. If you email me I will send to you if you wish. We sell “leads” in the auto market…120,000 per year per clients etc.. I understand your pain!
Sun Search Executive Recruiting
Leads are one thing, referrals are another. I own a consulting firm that works primarily with merger/acquisitions, turnaround, and reorganizations. 95% of my business comes from referrals. Chasing down every lead that comes across my desk is extremely time consuming. However, if I get a referral from a colleague or associate, our “close rate” is very high.
Research Analyst/Team lead for Channel management & Customer Contact Center Benchmarking, working on behalf SAP
I have been into market research for more than 1& half year. I have worked on various projects for Lead generation. I like to use Internet for Lead generation & websites for prospecting. Considering lead generation using internet the problem would be a DEAD CONTACT which later on i verify by calling procedure. One problem which everyone faces is that there are companies which have names directory , for that you must have atleast a name to get transfered & from there the prospecting starts untill & unless you find the RPC.
Executive Search Consultant in the Software & Professional Services Industry
The “gap” between marketing and sales is one of the key issues being addressed right now in B2B sales environments. There are a few interesting software companies providing marketing- and sales force automation solutions that allow you to bridge this gap, and they’re all doing extremely well. One very successful company is Eloqua – have a look at www.eloqua.com
CEO at MyLoan123, LLC and Owner, MyLoan123, LLC
We have what we like to call a pretty flawless CRM software that is provided to our clients to use for the leads we generate for them and for the ones that actually use it we can get some pretty accurate stats from them; but then again we also have the clients that even though they have the system to use they are still too lazy to use it OR they just like doing twice the work. If all of our clients would actually use the software we provide then they would know exactly what the ROI is for what they have invested with us and we would also know where to put all of our marketing dollars when it comes to generating the leads.
Experienced Marketing, Sales, Database, & Operations Manager
As my company’s database analyst it is my primary responsibility to input all leads that are received from various sources. Here’s a little bit about my company’s setup. We currently have 5 databases and 3 external sources that we receive leads from. Not to mention the “strays” that may come along from referrals.
We are barley mentioning what marketing campaign a lead come from, let alone from which database. I have mentioned it and the company is still finding new and improved ways to combat this ongoing problem. If you have any suggestions they would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
General Manager at Codemasters
This is a typical case of textbook theories and real life applications, which do not necessarily match up.
All companies go for trade shows, produce business cards, and print flyers and so on. Why do most companies spend for the first step of the game, but do not bother with documenting the process that comes in association with the initial step before making a sale?
Most deals get down to the individuals in companies and their networks. Even if you were to know the tread of their networks, somebody else tracing it back, trying the same tactics and using the same route, will most of the time never manage to get the same success that this first person had. It is partially down to human interaction. That is why most companies I have worked with did not bother with lead generation and spent more energy in hiring top marketing/sales people to lead under an agreed budget with well-defined targets/goals and get the deals done.
These people are there to cover the time obscuration, bridge the distance and attract the attention the company needs. If they fail? Sad to say, but companies rarely want to know why, but who failed and will believe that replacing that person will get the lead generation process back on track. Because they did the broadcast, they provided the concentration; people should get the bacon in. Simple.
Marketing Executive
Add value…do it for them! I created feedback loops (you know, the closed loop concept) for sales folks. If I didn’t get it, I had someone on my team call rep and get it. The reporting must ask for specific booked $ against a specific lead. (I’m assuming your leads are numbered or have some type of tracking ability.) This really helps re-sell and renew your contracts as you are showing your clients the ROI and value of the leads (your service).
Vice President – Marketing, Subex Ltd.
My experience with the difficulty in tracking a lead from capture to sale and evaluating the relative impact of multiple touchpoints that occur during this process is echoed by a lot of your respondents.
I think this difficulty arises from our inability to live with uncertainty. We must know and we believe we know only if we measure. So we start to measure and forget that measuring is means to an end and make it into a goal in itself.
If both sales and marketing are essentially trying to meet the same goal – the required sales/profit number why is that they are measured differently? We never try to micro evaluate a sales person’s activities and/or technique. We don’t want to know if a particular phone call, a particular dinner or a particular meeting closed the deal; as long as the deal is closed we don’t care what activity helped. I believe a similar approach is required when measuring marketing’s performance. Marketing’s job is to establish a contact and then mature that contact through the buying process to a point where sales handover becomes necessary. Why then should we not measure the number of contacts/opportunity and their rate of progression through the buying process? Why worry about the efficacy of a particular activity? Focus on the result of the sum total of many activities and I believe a lot of this headache will go away.
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Success Stories are part of my Success Through Balance approach to life. I believe that Success comes from living a balanced life. You can read more about being successful and the skills required here.
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