Lead Management
Best Practices
An effective, integrated approach using the 6 pillars of lead management: content marketing, lead capture, lead nurturing, lead scoring, opportunity handoff, and lead funnel measurement By OppSource.com
INTRODUCTION
Companies are pouring millions of dollars into marketing to generate leads. Of these leads, 80% will never be converted to sales. This dismal return on investment is the result of poor lead management — handing off leads to sales before the opportunity has been qualified. What is worse, according to a 2009 study by CSO Insights, 50% of all leads being actively pursued by the sales team have been generated by the sales team them-selves — not marketing. The system is broken. Lead Management Best Practices presents a new, more effective approach to lead
management.
With increasingly more complex selling and buying cycles, top-performing companies invest in lead management to maximize the performance of both marketing and sales. Compared to those lacking an effective lead management strategy, these companies enjoy higher revenue through increased sales-ready opportunities and lower overall cost per qualified lead. What these companies have discovered is that implementing lead management from an integrated, holistic approach — including content marketing, lead capture, lead nurturing, lead scoring, opportunity handoff, and lead funnel measurement— yields better results than applying one or two elements of lead management alone.
WHAT IS LEAD MANAGEMENT?
Often used interchangeably with the process of qualifying and closing leads, lead management is less involved with the sales funnel and more in-volved with the “marketing funnel.” The marketing funnel is the incubator where leads that are not yet qualified sales opportunities (QSOs) remain for nurturing. Lead management is a strategy for mobilizing the right people, processes and technologies aimed at delivering more QSOs. An effective lead management strategy must include a holistic approach to fully maximize the return on marketing investment in lead generation. Such an approach includes six key elements: content marketing, lead capture, lead nurturing, lead scoring, opportunity handoff, and lead funnel measurement. While marketing automation can make some elements of
“Instead of just
ignoring leads that
aren’t immediately
qualified,
we now
keep the
conversa-tion going
,
mov-ing them down
the continuum
from
awareness to
preference.
When
prospects do enter
the buying cycle,
Lawson is top of
mind.
It’s not just a
one-time shot with
our audiences
any-more.”
management process, leaving marketers disappointed with results. A holistic approach to lead management better leverages marketing auto-mation and can result in more QSOs.
SIX PILLARS OF EFFECTIVE LEAD MANAGEMENT
Marketing automation alone cannot drive more qualified sales opportuni-ties (QSOs). The six pillars of effective lead management below outline the additional elements required to not only deliver more QSOs, but also optimize the return on your marketing investment.
1
CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing is an essential part of a best practice lead man-agement process. Content must be mapped to the buying cycle, which in B2B (Business to Business) marketing can be described in the following three phases:
Education – In this phase, prospects are suspicious of vendors who overtly posture themselves. Instead, they are looking for non-vendor content, third party whitepapers, thought leadership webinars and videos, and research and trend reports.
Interest - In this phase, prospects are evaluating solutions against their objectives. They need solution-oriented content such as brochures, spec-sheets, comparison studies, demonstrations and more. This type of
The Six Pillars of
Effective Lead
Management:
1. Content Marketing — communications that are mapped to the buying cycle and move prospects through the buying cycle
2. Lead Capture — identi-fying all prospects from inbound and outbound marketing activity
3. Lead Nurturing — com-mon processes that con-tinue the conversation and build relationships digitally and personally as the lead becomes a qualified sales opportunity
4. Lead Scoring — based on common criteria, quanti-fies interactions that occur throughout the lead nur-turing process
5. Opportunity Handoff — BANTF analysis to deter-mine sales-readiness of a lead
6. Lead Funnel Measurement
information helps them start to visualize how their particular challenges can be addressed with available solutions. The interest phase is also where the building of personal relationships begins.
Preference – In this phase, prospects are evaluating vendors and the specific solutions they believe will best address their problems. The content they require is in-depth product capability, customer case studies, ROI data and feature comparison information. In the preference phase, personal relation-ships continue to be an important information bridge to help the prospect build confidence in their evolving preferences.
A good content marketing strategy is one that can help with both your inbound-marketing and outbound-marketing efforts. As part of lead management, it is important to provide the right content at the right time. By utilizing both digital and personal touches, you can more accurately determine the buying cycle phase and deliver timely and relevant information.
2
LEAD CAPTURE
Lead management is doomed to fail if marketers do not have a
handle on all the opportunities that arrive from every inbound and outbound source. The capturing process begins with a single centralized database of potential sales opportunities. This database is governed by a common process and methodology for managing the opportunities as they move through the marketing funnel and are later turned over to sales as QSOs. Think of your leads as a company asset much like inventory. Companies have thorough processes for tracking inventory from location to cost to turnover. The same thorough processes should hold true for leads. Without applying a common process and methodology to managing leads, compa-nies are spending money on an asset that is not being tracked and may not be providing a return on investment.
3
LEAD NURTURING
Lead nurturing involves a common process of continuing the conver-sation using digital and personal contact with prospects until a lead is ready to be turned over to sales. Shockingly, according to an Aberdeen Group study, more than half of all marketing departments do not nurture leads. An additional Sirius Decisions study indicates that 80% of leads not yet qualified will buy something in the category within 24 months. Therefore, lead nurtur-ing represents a significant opportunity to drive revenue by providnurtur-ing the sales force with more and better qualified sales opportunities. In addition, it ensures a greater and measurable return on marketing investment.
Serving the purpose of building the relationship to the point at which the prospect becomes a QSO, lead nurturing integrates three essential elements — process, people and technology. This integrated combination ensures an effective means of delivering more QSOs.
Process defines how leads will be nurtured, communicated with, and
man-aged using data segmentation. The communication and content is based on the specific needs of each segment and mapped to their respective buying cycle. Each lead goes through the process and is scored based on a number of common criteria. These include such things as online behaviors to various digital offers and conversations with lead qualification specialists to determine whether the lead needs further nurturing or is ready to be turned over to sales.
People ultimately buy from people and it is through personal contact with
the prospect that true intentions can be validated. When coupled with visibility to the lead tracking database, personal conversations that follow a defined methodology enable consistency in the lead nurturing process. These personal conversations allow for the assessment of prospect need, identification and connection of multiple buying influences for a given sales opportunity. They also determine whether a lead is a QSO and ready to be turned over to sales.
Technology helps streamline the nurturing process and optimizes resources
sophisticated lead scoring models, web analytics and marketing dashboards. This is where marketing automation can speed and simplify the process; however, without a rigorous process, carefully designed methodology and human contact, marketing automation technology is rendered less effective.
4
LEAD SCORING
Lead scoring should occur throughout the lead nurturing process by quantifying each interaction between the prospect and the company wheth-er digital, physical or pwheth-ersonal phone call. An effective lead scoring model applies a common set of criteria for quantifying behaviors and guiding the next action in the lead nurturing process. More importantly, lead scoring enables the marketer to rank leads within the marketing funnel and better prioritize the high ranking leads in need of personal contact.
An effective lead scoring approach integrates website/microsite metrics into the lead scoring model and creates a digital “breadcrumb trail” of a pros-pect’s online behaviors. For example, a prospect who visits a microsite is scored on the following criteria:
Title — indicates buying power and warrants a higher score
Key Account — warrants a higher score when on a preferred or targeted list
of national accounts
Content Downloaded — scores certain content higher than other content Quantity of Downloads — indicates a higher level of interest and receives
a higher score when downloads increase
Number of Contacts from a Single Organization — indicates potential
multiple buying influences and contributes to a higher score
As an ongoing part of the lead nurturing process, lead scoring helps com-panies better understand prospects by identifying a prospect’s location in the buying cycle and the next step in nurturing the lead. However, by itself, lead scoring does not necessarily identify a QSO that is ready to be turned
“Having OppSource
handle our
lead
management
has dramatically
improved
our
quality and quantity
of leads.
The
lead management
process has
increased the sales
pipeline by
$35
million dollars.
”
– LeAnn Castillo, Director of Marketing Communications, XATA Corporation [from XATA Case Study, Fleet Management Company Grows Sales
contact and the application of BANTFO (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing, Fit and Other) analysis — identifies when the lead is ready to be turned over to sales.
5
OPPORTUNITY HANDOFF
Opportunity handoff should be a seamless, automated transition from the marketing environment to the sales environment. This critical juncture is where many marketing and sales teams struggle. Both marketing and sales must accept mutual accountability for the end state — additional business. It is important to note that the process of delivering a QSO should be based on the criteria that sales deems as being qualified. Lead score alone is rarely indicative of the sales-readiness of a lead. At this stage, BANFTO analysis is required to ascertain the sales-readiness of the lead beyond what lead scor-ing can indicate.
For example, a lead can have a high score relative to the digital content the prospect has consumed. However, a personal phone call and BANTFO anal-ysis show that the contact does not have the authority to influence or make the final decision, and the timing to make the decision is one year away. Therefore, the lead remains in the marketing funnel for continued nurturing until the timing is right to turn it over to sales.
6
LEAD FUNNEL MEASUREMENT
One of the most important pillars of effective lead management is lead funnel measurement. Comprehensive lead measurement gives market-ers a better idea of the value of the marketing funnel as a business asset. It also indicates the effectiveness of both marketing and sales at delivering top-line results.
However, having a myopic marketing-only view of how well marketing is delivering QSOs is of little value if the opportunities are not tracked to rev-enue. When integrated with the CRM system, the lead management system also provides essential sales pipeline visibility that marketers need to de-termine the ROI of their marketing investment as it relates to sales revenue. CRM integration enables greater accountability for end-to-end lead man-agement on the part of both marketing and sales.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Marketing departments, tasked with lead generation campaigns from in-bound and outin-bound efforts often lack the people, processes and tech-nologies required to effectively manage the leads already in the marketing funnel. Although many marketers have invested in marketing automation technology to streamline lead management, without the people and rigor-ous processes, lead management fails to deliver more qualified sales oppor-tunities.
Companies that apply an effective lead management program by inte-grating the six pillars can significantly increase the number of QSOs and revenue. In addition, effective lead management maximizes the return on marketing and sales investments by applying the right resources to the op-portunities that represent the greatest return. As a result, the overall cost per lead is reduced.
The
Pursuit
of Demand
Some see
marketing leads
as an end result.
We see them as the beginning of a
sales opportunity
.
Generating and nurturing leads into sales opportunities and creating demand is what OppSource is all about. We provide an essential connection between marketing and sales that can significantly improve your company’s return on marketing investment. Our lead management process is more personalized than the one-dimensional automation solutions offered by other companies — and more cost-efficient because you don’t need to hire on-staff expertise.
With OppSource, we combine personal contact, digital tools, and more focused communication to improve customer interaction.
We start by capturing leads from all your marketing activities, while also generating additional contacts. Then we engage all prospects with valuable information, offers and news, that position you as a trusted resource. We track, qualify, nurture and score leads all along the way, so we know where prospects stand in the process. When they’re ready to buy, you know them and they know you. OppSource even has the capability to set the appointment and deliver a sales-ready, qualified opportunity to your sales force.
If you’re ready to extract more value from your company’s marketing investment by transforming leads into revenue, talk to OppSource. We can help make sure your marketing leads actually lead somewhere.
