Sales and Marketing: Wake Up and Start Refining Your Leads
I was reminded yesterday of one of the fundamental failure points of many marketing and sales teams: lead management. This reminder was painful.
I was meeting with some savvy people who drive leads for B2B firms and the topic of lead management practices came up in discussion.
The short-story version is that in spite of tremendous advances in technology tools to analyze, monitor and manage sales leads in the three years since I’ve been charged with doing this, many (actually, the word used was “most”) firms are less than diligent in managing leads from the initial touch-point to final disposition.
“Sigh.”
This is not a new story, but it is a disappointing one, because it is so easily cured with the development of sound processes and of course with good collaboration on the part of sales and marketing executives and personnel.
While some touches don’t merit extensive processing, in my experience, if the right processes are in place, good decisions are made over time as to the handling, incubation (additional marketing) and conversion of a lead.
Unfortunately, as alluded to above, many organization drop the ball either at the initial touch-point or at some next step, when they disappear into some marketing, database or sales black hole.
Under the auspices of my original blog, Art Petty on Management, I wrote a post titled: “Sales and Marketing Managers: Use the Lead Refinery Approach to Improve Results.” I suggested that the concept of a refinery was a good metaphor for viewing the lead management process. Consider an oil refinery where crude comes in one end and through various stages and processes, different types and grades of oils, solvents and fuels emerge, and you get the concept.
In my opinion, this metaphor still holds and the inherent concepts of developing good, holistic lead management processes are more important than ever.
While I encourage you to look at my original post for the complete concept, here’s an excerpt:
The Concept of the Lead Refinery
“Leads are the raw materials that ultimately end up as closed sales. Both marketing and sales engage in a great number of activities that may start out as raw contacts and flow through a system of qualification and disposition. Trade shows bring badge scans, individuals register to download content at a web site, marketing campaigns result in inquiries and sales reps prospect in target accounts to identify projects and interest. All of these contacts enter the Refinery, although some enter at different points, depending upon their level of quality (qualification).
Some contacts remain in the Refinery to be processed (incubated) over time. Others are purged and some percentage of the contacts continues on their journey through a series of filtering steps into the selling process. Contacts are transformed to leads, qualified leads and ultimately closed or lost sales. While the labels differ from environment to environment, the process is fundamentally the same.”
Building and Tuning Your Lead Refinery:
As you might imagine from the description above, creating an effective lead refinery requires the creation of systems, processes and yes, positions that work to constantly assess what to do with a particular lead. Some suggestions:
-Define processes and terms. Sales and marketing must create agree upon and support a turnkey lead qualification process where there are common definitions of what constitutes and differentiates a touch from a contact from a lead from a highly qualified lead.
-Spend money to make money. Screw up the courage to dedicate resources to managing the lead flow and owning a good deal of lead incubation. I’ve used the concept of a “Qualifying Center” to employ talented, early career and often near future salespeople to own the leads and to work between marketing and sales to manage the flow.
The Qualifying Center reps want highly qualified leads to move to sales and they want to ensure that strategies are established to manage raw contacts that may evolve into future highly qualified leads. I have no qualms linking the variable compensation of these reps to the actual outcomes of the sales pros they are working with. In the case of a sub-$100 million dollar B2B software firm, the $300K that we spent on the Qualifying Center (full loaded) contributed mightily to supporting $30+ million in license sales. This was money well spent and it served as a critical training ground for sales as well as a great connection point between promotions and sales.
-Did I indicate that Sales and Marketing have to work together? While this is another rant for another day, there are no excuses for the CEO not ensuring that the sales and marketing executives have shared accountability for the lead and sales pipelines and the resultant flow-through. The lead refinery is not a closed loop…it must connect to the sales supply line.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Call me old-fashioned, but at the end of the day, I need to create customers and sell services and products. While many of the tools have changed and the methods that people use to interact with us, learn about our brands and gauge are worthiness as suppliers are constantly evolving, I’m still critically concerned about connecting my marketing and sales processes to create results.
Build a lead refinery, and you might just learn some remarkable things about your marketing effectiveness. Most of what you will learn will be how to improve and drive better results faster and cheaper.
Of course, this takes discipline, hard work and accountability. Hopefully, these qualities are not in short supply in your firm.
Hey Tech Marketers, How About Helping Your Customers Solve Problems
“Nobody Cares About Your Products (Except You),” is one of the core rules that author and marketing thought-leader David Meerman Scott espouses in his latest book, World Wide Rave, and throughout his other works and blogs.
The most zealous anti-smokers that I know are former smokers. The fact that in hindsight, I can see that I was guilty of being a bit too proud of the features and functions of my own products as a technology marketer makes me just a bit maniacal about David’s product rule as a user and consumer of tech products today. Unfortunately, it seems like there are still quite a few technology marketers out there that did not get the memo.
My Mini-Technology Odyssey:
For the past few weeks, I’ve been in search of a solution that will allow me to better serve my customers and grow my business. My opportunity is to extend my service offerings by providing e-learning services/courses to subscribers to specific audiences. Based on the feedback that I’ve received in teaching or supplementing my MBA programs with on-line offerings and given the time and cost challenges that so many professionals are facing, I’m convinced that it is time to expand into subscription-based e-learning.
What I thought would be a simple search has turned into a quest worthy of Homer. While it is quite possible that I’m seeking fulfillment for a problem that has not yet been solved—a service that will allow independents and small firms to offer e-learning via a hosted platform with e-commerce and participant management functions, I don’t think this is the issue. There are plenty of firms that purport to offer all, most of or parts of this solution. I think.
Here are the Marketing Lessons I’ve Discovered Thus Far:
-Value-chain and systems thinking are foreign topics. There are a myriad of pieces and parts providers that might sell more pieces and parts if they were able to connect people like me with other providers and partners in the value chain.
Instead of focusing on where their offering fits, these firms view the world through the eyes of their products, not the needs of their customers. Remember the old saying that no one buys a drill, they are buying the hole? It’s true.
In one memorable discussion with a rep for a flash authoring tool, he seemed taken aback that I might ask about platforms or other service providers where I could use the output of his company’s offerings. A review of their web site left you thinking that this very substantial organization viewed themselves as the center of the e-learning universe, yet in reality they are just one component provider. Marketing myopia, anyone?
-Feature lists do not equal answers to business problems. Most of the service providers that sound like they might just solve my problem forced me to wade through long lists of discrete, acronym filled feature lists and jargon, only to leave me wondering whether they truly have what I need. What do you do? Who do you serve? How are your offerings solving problems? None of those questions are tackled head-on.
-Once you get a live human on the phone, you want to throw him/her back. Not once have I encountered a rep on the phone that is capable of indicating whether their offerings meet my needs. They either are clueless or they are so obviously incented to sell what they have, that they engage in something that reeks of used car sales tactics.
-Speaking of used car sales: What will it take for you to drive this product home today? I love the vendors that require you to walk on hot coals to gain access to pricing. Most often, they require a demo before sharing pricing with you. Sorry, but life is too short. I don’t care about YOUR SELLING PROCESS! I want a solution to my business challenge.
Tough Love for Marketers:
1. Revisit your website and ask your customers and targeted buyers to tell you whether your messaging and presentation are helping them understand how you might solve their problems. Build content to match your buyers and ensure that it speaks to solutions, not features.
2. Develop a systems-thinking mentality if you are selling pieces and parts. More than likely, no one needs your piece and part in isolation. The better you can relate and link your offerings to other good offerings in the value-chain, the more your prospective buyers will be comfortable in purchasing your offerings.
3. Stop with the offensive, insulting and invasive selling tactics and pricing shell games! You are just pissing us off.
4. Educate your reps. Teach them how to ask questions and help clients solve problems.
The Bottom-line for Now:
Enough with the myopic thinking and feature-focused, jargon-filled gobbledygook that passes for marketing messaging. Help someone solve a problem and you will sell more. Guaranteed.
Will this Business Revolutionize How Men Shop and Rescue Me from My 1970′s Fashion Training at the Same Time?
Note from Art: I plan on chronicling my experience in several posts over the next few weeks, with an exciting new men’s clothing/shopping service that I was introduced to called Trunk Club. I’m not sure if I’m more excited about the solution to my fashion challenges, or the fact that this is the best recent example that I’ve seen of a service that so perfectly solves a problem that it practically sells itself. (The authors of the book Tuned In describe this type of offering as a Resonator.)
I have no stake in the Trunk Club for Men and when I let the co-founder, Matthew Scott, know that I planned on posting about my experience with his service, he urged me to help them get better. I love his attitude! And I will.
I’m not sure guys are supposed to write posts about fashion. I’m expecting a call from my friend Chris, encouraging me to turn in my “man card” for writing on this topic. He did that the one and only time I was dumb enough to indicate that I might have caught a fleeting glimpse of Oprah’s show when author Marcus Buckingham was the guest.
We’ll Chris, my excuse is even better this time. I’m mixing fashion with business research. Take that!
OK, some background is in order here on the roots of my fashion challenges.
First, I am a child of the 70s, when to quote my kids looking at the old family pictures, “What were you people thinking?”
“Hey, what’s wrong with yellow and green plaid bell-bottoms paired with rust colored shirts?” I retort to these logo-covered and self-annointed fashion critics. I don’t have the heart to tell them that I look at these same pictures in horror that anyone ever thought those clothes were acceptable for public consumption.
For those too young to recall, the 70’s started out with post-hippie era styling and concluded with disco. Leisure suits were born somewhere in the middle of that “tasteful” decade.
Second, I transitioned at some point in my career from the standard blue suit, white shirt uniform that we wore at Panasonic to software-sloppy…the business casual that dominated the software industry for so many years.
Combine my 70’s experience with the blue suit to software casual experience, and I have a wardrobe that is just short of lousy with a sense of style that matches.
The Problem:
My professional world has transitioned from the daily corporate casual to super casual (home office) or on-stage as a speaker, seminar leader or MBA instructor. I need some great quality clothes for the “on” days, and thankfully, there are many of these days on the calendar in the coming months. It’s time for a wardrobe makeover.
A bit more background. is in order. I hate shopping. I hate shopping for clothing most of all. There are many bad things that could be done to me that would be less painful than shopping. The thought of it makes me recoil in horror. If my wife suggests a shopping trip that will take us even close to the Men’s department, my mind goes blank, my eyes glaze over and I immediately feel the need to take a long nap. Ask me to figure out any color and pattern combinations beyond white or off-white with dark and once again my mind goes blank.
I survived fashion hell for a number of years with a great retail clerk at the former Marshall Fields. Jan learned my tastes and did a pretty good job of helping me out during my once a year visit. Well, Fields is gone and so is Jan, replaced by crappy off the rack merchandise and unhelpful staff at the local Macy’s. My last fashion lifeline disappeared when Fields died.
Until now. Enter Trunk Club for Men. The service is positioned as an innovative new service for busy professional men and successful entrepreneurs. There is a membership component that gives it an air of personalization and exclusivity. If this works, it may rank as one of the great problem-solving discoveries of my adult life.
One to One meets Web 2.0:
Here’s the business in a nutshell. You start by visiting the website and completing an application. I was invited to join by the co-founder, but be aware that the process does involve completing a no-fee application that helps Trunk Club understand a bit more about you and your clothing tastes and needs. More about the application process in a future post.
Once you’ve been accepted as a member, you meet via webcam with a personal fashion consultant who interviews you to understand your requirements and your budget parameters. After your webcam interview, your fashion consultant shops for and ships your clothes.
Once you’ve received the shipment, you and your consultant reconvene on a webcam call to review the items. You decide what you will keep and return the rest, paying only for your final selections. That’s it. Oh, and your consultant will even direct you to a Trunk Club approved tailor in your area.
Let’s review:
- I never have to leave my house. The clothes come to me.
- I gain the best guidance of a fashion pro.
- I return what I don’t want and only pay for what I keep. There are no other fees or no minimum purchase amounts.
- The fashion consultant shops to my budget and seeks out the best quality and value that fits that budget.
- Unlike the visit to a retail store, your fashion consultant works with you over time to learn your likes and dislikes and to fill out your wardrobe with a plan in mind.
- If I need more of something, I send a note and things magically show up.
This rocks!
While I’m being a bit melodramatic in my description of my helplessness in the line of retail fire, I truly love this concept. I don’t know too many guys that care about shopping and those that do seem to operate with a search and destroy mentality. Go in, select and exit as quickly as possible. There’s no plan, just a short-term mission.
With Trunk Club for Men, my modus operandi hasn’t changed, but all of the pain is gone. I will spend minimal time thinking about the topic and leave the execution to a professional. No stores, no changing rooms, just a big box of things to try on in my home. Delegating to experts is something that I can handle. This seems right on so many levels!
My parameters to Darcy, my consultant, are to focus on developing a small selection of high quality items of classic styling for use in speaking and workshop engagements. Most of my work does not require a suit, so establishing a core grouping of jackets, shirts, slacks and ties is the top priority.
I can’t wait to see what Darcy sends me.
Stay tuned to see if this is as good as it sounds or too good to be true. I’m betting on the former.
Future Post: I’ll share more about the video interview and business process, as well as the results of Darcy’s shopping trip.
Trade Shows: If You Must Use Them, Set Yourself Up for Success
In prior posts…one in particular entitled, “Marketers, Are Trade Shows Extinct Yet,” I raised the ire of a fair number of marketers for expressing my belief in the demise of this ancient marketing tactic.
After many lengthy discussions, a good friend and great marketer said it best. “You’re not necessarily writing off event marketing, you’re just down on how most companies and marketers approach event and trade show marketing.”
That’s a fair assessment. My slight clarification is…”If you absolutely have to engage in event and trade show marketing, it better be one focused tactic in a portfolio of activities, and you better execute it flawlessly.” Especially given the budgetary pressures that every firm is under in this economy.
I do find it increasingly ridiculous to spend precious budget dollars to rent space for a few days in the hope that someone that might need something that you have will trip across your booth and strike up a conversation that leads to a relationship and a sale.
While it’s not impossible that lightening will strike…just like someone somewhere wins the lottery. I just hate to count on winning the lottery to pay the bills.
Like the million plus airline miles I’ve piled up thus far in my career, I’ve invested more than a few thousand hours of my life working and walking show floors. As a young professional, I worked for the Trade Show equivalent of the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld.
I now walk floors (as infrequently as possible) with a critic’s eye. I generally don’t like what I see and hear.
Common Catastrophes in Trade Show Marketing:
- Unintelligible signage. What do you do?
- Poorly trained booth representatives. It’s like looking for computer advice at Circuit City. No one knows what they are talking about.
- Groups of the poorly trained reps huddling with each other and ignoring interested passers by.
- Company participants that view shows as an all expense paid trip.
- Companies that fail to leverage shows for media and analyst work.
- Firms that show up, rent space and don’t have a presence in the programs and experts in sessions and on panels.
- Too many booth reps.
- Too few booth reps.
- Reps that don’t operate with an understanding of key qualifying questions.
- Staffing the booth with junior associates because senior people need to be free to roam the floor.
- Hired help that looks nice but has no connection with the firm. (That’s a euphemism.)
Back at corporate, I frequently evaluate marketing practices and systems, and the event experience continues to break down here.
Corporate Mismanagement of Trade Show Marketing:
- Most marketing teams don’t know what an event is worth to them. Few have the data that they should have to justify investing in an event year after year.
- Event selection and budgeting happens by…”We always attend this show,” and “So and so wanted to experiment with this one.”
- The pre-event planning generally does not include important things like inviting and meeting with customers, integrating analyst and editor briefings, targeting key audiences likely to attend, leveraging pre-event tactics like webinars, e-newsletters and blog posts to create interest in the event.
- Leads are managed like the Roach Motel. They go into the system, but they don’t come out.
- Message maps are not developed for the floor staff scheduled to work the show.
I’ll stop here, because I can keep building these lists of execution failures.
My erstwhile colleague encouraged me to quit complaining and offers some tools to help marketers begin building improved execution practices into their event and trade show programs.
I took the challenge and crafted “The Management Excellence Guide to Trade Show Marketing in a Recession,” and am offering this as a free download in this post and on the main page at this blog.
Click here to download: Guide to Trade Show Marketing in a Recession
The guide is by no means exhaustive, but it does offer some practices and suggestions that if implemented, will improve any firm’s execution and results from trade show marketing. If you have your own suggestions to offer, feel free to add them here in the comments section. I promise I will revise the Guide and incorporate your ideas with attribution and republish it as Version 2. Let’s write the Best Practices in Trade Show Marketing together.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
If you absolutely, positively believe you need trade shows as part of your marketing program, it’s time to improve your execution, your efficiency and your effectiveness. I’ll be all too happy to hear about your successes and innovations as you breathe life into this truly ancient and often mismanaged tactic.
The Last Yard: AT&T’s Failure to Fully Satisfy in Spite of A Competition Killing Product
I suspect from the crowd at the Crystal Lake, IL AT&T store on the day after Christmas, that I was not the only person in America that had decided to surprise someone in their family with a new Apple 3G iPhone. While I cannot be certain what it was like at the Verizon store where they do not carry the iPhone, the AT&T location was filled with people seeking to port their numbers and accounts over to this exclusive provider for the iPhone.
Before I get too far, my issue and our learning opportunities come from AT&T’s System for on-boarding new customers with the iPhone. The store team on the ground in Crystal Lake was great throughout the entire process.
My issue is more with AT&T’s seemingly incomplete and poor system (not the store’s) for helping customers ramp up on this season’s ultimate killer product.
Here’s a quick synopsis of what it took.
- I started the process of acquiring a new iPhone for my college-age son a few weeks ago. I use AT&T in my business, but the family was with the other guys. I needed to find out how I could add a phone and deal with the texting, internet and voice needs of a serial texter. I called AT&T and spoke with 2 reps who were completely incapable of confidently telling me what my options were and what the final costs would be to add a second line, switch to family talk and meet my son’s specs for usage. Time investment…approximately one hour and no satisfaction whatsoever.
- I tried the website. Same result…no luck. I defy anyone to pull off this simple transaction using their website. Also, on this prime shopping day during prime daytime hours, the site was down for quite awhile undergoing maintenance. Hmmm. I wonder who scheduled that event?
- I went to the store in Crystal Lake, IL and 45 minutes later I walked out with a new iPhone and Brett’s assurance that I could bring it back after Christmas to port my son’s Verizon number and move all of his contacts. I also had the 800 number for the AT&T porting service in case I wanted to try that on my own. Outstanding! Score one for dealing with real live people face to face.
- Christmas Day…the iPhone was a huge hit and a total surprise. My wife and I had resorted to a little bit of Christmas present cruelty by just mumbling and groaning something about contracts every time my son raised the question of whether there was an iPhone in his future. OK, it was mean, but the kid is tough, the world is not always kind, and it sure heightened his surprise!
- Christmas Day again. I wondered whether AT&T was aggressive enough to have people standing by to help their many, many new customers activate their freshly unwrapped products and start the meter running for billing purposes. No such luck. The recorded message indicated that they were closed for the day. (OK, I feel a bit Scrooge-like here, but if I have a killer product like the iPhone and my success is a function of getting people smiling and dialing or texting as quickly as possible, I might have taken a different path on the holiday.)
- December 26. I power-dialed the 800 number at AT&T, put the speakerphone on and wrote a blog post, answered e-mail and reviewed the latest draft of a presentation. After one hour and twenty minutes of being on-hold, I gave up. The next step was the store.
- We were early, and got right up to the counter. Another helpful Rep efficiently ported over my son’s 245 contacts from the Verizon phone (big score!) and then started the phone number port process. The dedicated line for store reps must have been slammed. He was on hold for 34 minutes before anyone answered. During this time, the store filled, the line grew and everyone was after the same thing. The family next to us had a shopping bag filled with iPhones needing numbers. Before long, every rep in the store was on the phone and customer service ground to a halt.
- Truth be told, once our rep was connected with someone on the AT&T side, the port was carried out smoothly and we were quickly on our way. Probably not a moment too soon, as the people in line were getting a little feisty as the reps continued to be stuck on hold waiting for help.
My Points:
Again, this is not one of those 8 hours on the tarmac with no food or water and the toilets clogged, stories that the airlines are so good at creating. And yet from this experience, I can’t help but think that AT&T doesn’t get it.
- Any opportunity to capture a competitor’s subscribers must be a huge opportunity for the phone companies. There has to be a natural motivation to create happy new customers. All of those Verizon converts are viable prospects for internet, cable and any of the other products that they come up with to slowly bleed consumers dry. The iPhone is the killer-app for converting customers, and its star power may not last forever.
- The iPhone is a resonator…(Tuned In). It is truly a remarkable device that practically sells itself. And while the device offers a remarkable experience (not necessarily for the phone portion), AT&T missed the chapter on creating remarkable customer experiences.
- If you are AT&T, what chucklehead decided that it was OK to staff the call center with a Rep level that had customers waiting for hours on the phone or almost an hour in-store to get their new products up and running? Someone somewhere focused on costs, kept the staff lean and forgot that they were in the business of creating great customer experiences. And oh yeah, I would have had people working on Christmas Day to help satisfy their overwhelming urge to use this great new product.
The Bottom-Line:
Thanks to the team in Crystal Lake for helping us out so effectively, and thanks to Apple for such a great product. As for you AT&T, I can think of other industries and companies that are disappearing because they failed to execute on the last yard. Any leader or any company that is arrogant and complacent about taking care of customers is likely not a good long-term bet. Perhaps they will figure out the “system” to satisfy customers with the next killer product that comes along once in a lifetime.
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