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.