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November 2008
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Guest ColumnWhere Have My Leads Gone?By Alyssa Dver, Sedona Corporation
THE GOOD NEWS: You have tons of leads. THE BAD NEWS: You have tons of leads
á ăI just hung up the phone with one of our supposed ăhotä leads. They said they got tired of waiting for us to contact them so they bought from our competition.ä These thoughts probably ring true with most marketing managers. We work like dogs trying to generate cost-effective, quality leads and then find ourselves wondering what happened to the leads. Talk about pain. Ever been in a management meeting where sales is defending the lack of revenue results and blaming marketing for not delivering enough qualified leads? Ever have to justify your budget based on the performance of your last yearâs program successes? I
have and itâs not fun. Many vendors use the label of Lead Management to explain how their product will help you organize and follow-up on leads. Contact management systems, sales force automation systems and the like all blur the real issue of lead management. These systems focus on the sales activities rather than the marketing activities that happen even before a sales person receives a lead. Most organizations donât have the luxury of a large sales function that can take unqualified leads and work them in concert with their hot opportunities.
Many businesses use telemarketing, direct mail, or other marketing means to qualify a lead to ensure that once the lead is passed to a sales representative, it is at least warm, ideally boiling hot. Marketing organizations will have a number of programs, people, and processes (the practical ă3Pâsä of marketing) to help generate and qualify suspects into leads. With so many individuals involved in this process and the additional people required to close a deal, once a lead is qualified, in many ways resembles herding cats. As a marketer, I need and want a system that can help me manage the qualification process and it must allow me to easily distribute leads to the right individuals to further qualify or close them. AND most importantly, I want to easily track that lead to make sure it isnât lost! If we can do this, we get some pretty substantial side benefits such as the ability to measure our effectiveness in generating quality leads with a definite return on investment. This helps us show our bosses that our marketing programs are working and marketing may not always be the culprit of the 4th quarter revenue panic. In addition I donât want to find out the status of the leads by chasing sales reps that may not remember the lead even if they did follow up on it. There is just too much data and too little time, but there is something that can help ö the Internet! A new breed of Lead Management systems is evolving which can become a marketerâs best friend. These systems focus on the need for marketing organizations to organize, track and automatically move leads through a qualification process and into a sales cycle. Most marketing departments will acquire leads from purchased lists (such as from magazines or list brokers), create leads from their web site or marketing programs (such as tradeshows or direct mail), and generally attract leads from advertising or other mass marketing programs. It is not unusual that a small marketing organization is dealing with 1,000-10,000 leads every month. As with many things in life, the key here is quality, not quantity. So even if the organization is dealing with a handful of leads, it is critical that those leads are carefully tracked so they donât get stale after all the hard work to get them! Rather than assume leads come in qualified or that there are large organizations we can count on to qualify raw leads, the new Lead Management systems are tools designed for the marketing department
to ensure that leads are efficiently followed-up on and tracked. This facilitates a continuous monitoring of lead generation programs and overall improvement of the qualification process. Letâs take a real scenario as example: As VP of Marketing for a small software company in Cambridge, MA, my marketing department of 5 was effectively creating over 1000 potential leads per month. The problem was once we got those leads, the 10 person sales organization wanted only the ones who were ready to buy. But being that my staff was so small and busy, I couldnât ask them to call each one themselves. We did use direct mail and Internet marketing to help further qualify names and in the end used a telemarketing group to qualify further. My problem however got worse. Now I had several different methods being used to help qualify leads and no efficient way to know what the left or right hand was doing. I didnât know how many leads were in the pipeline, or at what stage they were. I had no idea which programs were generating the best leads or which channel was qualifying them most effectively. I was very frustrated and couldnât defend myself or my group when the question of marketing
effectiveness was raised. I wound up hiring a full-time person to track leads using Excel and with a lot of follow-up phone time. But even she couldnât keep up with the dynamic data drawn from the mouths of individuals who didnât always report the truth. Ouch. From that experience, I set out to develop a system to help. The idea was simple: letâs build a system that can congregate, distribute, track, and measure leads as they come into my group. The system should allow multiple individuals to work on the leads both inside and outside of my group and company. I wanted the system to automate the movement of leads through the organization and get them to eventually either be qualified leads so they could be passed to sales or if need be, reject the lead as a
ădonât pursueä lead so can conserve time (and oh by the way, make sure that name doesnât come back to me through another channel so I start all over again!). The system needs to be accessible inside and outside of the company so remote personnel (sales, 3rd party telemarketing, etc.) can seamlessly participate. I was determined to make it so easy to use that there is no training required and even a busy marketing or sales person could wing it. As a senior manager, I wanted to be able to see at any time, or have the system notify me regularly, on the status of leads and the measurement of the qualification process so I can make adjustments where necessary or increase the focus on successful areas. And if I want, allow me to send reports of lead or program status to my peers or boss at anytime without any IT hassle. And lastly, I wanted the system to be affordable and easy
to implement so even a small company can use it without hassle. Depending on your organization and the role of marketing and sales, dealing with leads will differ. In my own experience working at and consulting with several companies, most folks admit that they do a lousy job at exploiting the leads they get. Why? Because it is usually too expensive, complicated- or one is being tasked with that chore in addition to other responsibilities and being measured on the results. Ironically, with so little resources available and so much competition out there, you would think organizations would want to find ways to carefully cultivate suspect data into leads. Now there are systems that can help. Finally the marketing department has a way to easily and affordably manage leads. Personally, I would much prefer using my creative energy to come up with innovative marketing programs rather than spending it on ways to figure out how to track the leads. Wouldnât you? --------
Alyssa Dver is Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of SEDONA Corporation where she manages several functions including Marketing, Product Management, Customer Care, Training, Account Management Sales, and Investor Relations. Alyssa has been actively involved in the Internet CRM and financial services arena for several years. Prior to joining SEDONA, she was the founder of Lead Factory Inc., a Web-based lead tracking solution, where she conceptualized and led the company to develop a now commercially available product. Alyssa has executive management experience with start-ups, as well as with large companies including Empresa Inc., CenterLine Software, Cincom Systems, and Digital Equipment Corporation, and has held international positions both domestically and based overseas. Alyssa is currently writing an article for BusinessWeek on ăreal-time enterprise.ä She was featured on American Airlines in-flight audio program and has been published in several journals including ABA Bank Marketing, AFP Exchange, CRMCommunity.com, CUNA Magazine, and Sales-Advertising-Marketing (SAM) Magazine. Alyssa is often quoted in topical articles and is a requested speaker at trade conferences and customer events.
455 South Gulph Road, Suite 300 King Of Prussia, PA 19406 PH: 800.815.3307 Fax: 484.679.2201 E: customercare@sedonacorp.com -------- Submit your "Guest Column" today directly to our staff at Tjfr@NewsBios.com. September 24, 2002 |
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