How to leverage marketing to get more from your salesforce

Editor's Notes

• #3: It was not that long ago that Business-to-Business (B2B) selling was considered by most to be an art form. While you could measure the end result in revenue, the only evidence for what worked (or didn’t) was anecdotal.
• #4: Moreover, if selling was art, then B2B marketing was a “black art”, consisting largely of deliverables (brochures, press releases, ads, etc.) that magically helped the sales team sell. Unlike consumer product marketing, in which statistics about shelf space, sales volume by retailers, etc., enabled precise measurement and evaluation, other forms of B2C and B2B organizations struggled to codify best practices.
• #5: Both sales and marketing teams would agree that “high-quality leads” are more likely to turn into real sales revenue; however, there’s very little agreement inside most firms about what actually constitutes a “high-quality” or “qualified” lead. Marketers look months and even years down the road as they seek to develop a brand and grow broad interest in their company. On the other hand, sales is laser-focused on hitting their numbers for the here and now. This disparity has caused much finger pointing between sales and marketing over the years.
• #6: Sales For Life, Inbound Sales Survey of over 500 sales reps (2010)
• #7: For example, while marketing is tasked with generating leads, it turns out that half of all sales leads are generated by sales representatives themselves, according to the study. Now I take this with some grain of salt, having managed both sides of this equation. I found that sales representatives are quick to discredit the role marketing has in generating the lead. Still this constitutes a major failure for most marketing teams that they are not even aware of. Indeed the survey revealed that marketing executives were three times less likely than sales executives to see lead generation as a major challenge. This disconnect between sales and marketing profoundly impacts profitability. If, as the survey suggests, low-quality leads are resulting in “no decision” twenty percent of the time, the lack of quality would therefore increase the cost of sales by approximately twenty percent – even if the sales team closed ALL the leads that were qualified. To quantify this, a company with a one million dollar a year revenue stream and a SGA expense of ten percent of revenue on average would be experiencing an average profitability loss approaching $20,000. This is just from the entry of unqualified leads into the sales pipeline, not even accounting for what the sales representatives could do with the time it takes to chase after those “no decision” deals.
• #8: In 2008, the market research firm CSO Insights (www.csoinsights.com) continued its 14-year effort to scientifically study how the role of sales is changing. Their 2008 Sales Performance Optimization survey revealed, depressingly, that 20% of all forecasted opportunities (i.e., leads that enter the sales pipeline) eventually resulted in “no decision.” Since a real opportunity would result in the prospect’s buying from the vendor or a competitor, that “no decision” is a strong indicator that those leads were never properly qualified. The reason that unqualified leads enter the pipeline, according to CSO Insights, is the general inability for sales and marketing teams to agree on what actually constitutes a “qualified lead”. The survey revealed that, when itcomes to defining a qualified lead, sales and marketing teams are at a deadlock.
• #9: Lead qualification is only one factor when it comes to turning prospects into revenue. Another statistical study strongly suggests that a fast response time may be as important as the basic quality of the lead. This highlights the need for real-time transition of leads from Marketing to Sales.In 2007, James B. Oldroyd, a professor at MIT, conducted a survey and collected 495 responses from companies that drive web leads to their websites. The survey revealed that neither Marketing nor Sales had any quantifiable notion of how to efficiently follow-up on web-generated leads. In 2009, Oldroyd tried a different approach. He analyzed 3 years-worth of call-back data from six companies that generate and respond to web leads; he tracked more than 15,000 leads and more than 100,000 call attempts. The leads were captured through a web form and called (or an attempt was made to call) at least one time.To clarify, these were “sales-ready” leads who suggested that they were ready to buy, rather than leads that just happened to show up on the website or were interested in unrelated content, such as a white paper. Even more, the qualified leads were specifically handed off to the Sales team, so there was no question that within either the Sales, or the Marketing teams, they were highly qualified.When that data was analyzed statistically, it was discovered that if a sales representative waits an hour to contact a lead generated from a website, that representative is 10 times less likely to actually get through to that customer. Similarly, that hour-long wait makes it six times less likely that the lead will be qualified, even if the sales representative does manage to get through.
• #10: The figures become even more compelling when the time periods are compressed even further: the odds of reaching a lead drops 100 times if called within 30 minutes versus five minutes.
• #11: Similarly, even if the lead is contacted, the odds of actually qualifying that lead (and getting it into the pipeline) drop 21 times if called within 30 minutes versus five minutes. In other words, website leads were of great value if pursued immediately, but that value degraded quickly. In fact, the study showed that after 20 days, repeatedly attempting to contact a lead was completely counterproductive, making it almost impossible to qualify the lead at all.
• #13: Diagnosing a problem is always the first step to fixing it. Unfortunately, in the past it wasn’t possible to diagnose sales problems with enough accuracy to determine what was really wrong. As a result, many sales “fixes” were simply blind experiments. By contrast, applying statistical measurements to real-life sales behaviour is like administering a CAT scan. Statistical measurement not only confirms that there’s a problem, but also defines its size and shape so that management can take appropriate action to correct it.
• #14: As in repairing any relationship, the key step is communicating and developing trust. According to Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez (www.marketo.com),”the VP of Sales and VP of Marketing should go get a beer together.” This commitment from the top will encourage other team members to continue the conversation. “This is not something to delegate or pawn off,” Barry Trailer, Co-founder, CSO Insights says. “For the process to have legitimacy, you have to have executive participation.”When Marketing sits down with Sales and asks for the definition of a good lead and how best to deliver them, the dynamic between the two department’s changes. With the definition of sales-ready in hand, Marketing can begin rebuilding trust by delivering leads that meet that standard.The studies described above diagnosed and delineated two major problems. First, many Sales teams aren’t receiving high-quality leads. Second, when they do get those leads, they often don’t move quickly enough to take full advantage of them. When these two problems occur within the same organization, it creates an exponential drop in revenue. Fortunately, addressing both issues concurrently generates a geometric improvement in profitable sales.
• #15: As with many things, this has all changed with the advent of the Internet. Buyers now have more control than ever over their buying processes. Building alignment between Sales and Marketing teams, in order to match this new buying process, is now more important than ever. Since online activity can be tracked and measured, it’s now possible to accurately assess the effectiveness of both marketing deliverables and sales behaviours.