B2B Marketing Features

Until fairly recently, lead management was a job for the sales team. Marketers generated the leads, fed them through to salespeople, and that was that. However, this was never an entirely satisfactory solution, as was shown by a March 2009 report from marketing automation provider Eloqua, which revealed that on average B2B organisations convert fewer than 60 per cent of marketing leads into sales leads.

Partly because of these sort of dismal figures, partly because of increased pressures brought on by the economic climate and partly because of new technologies coming to the market to facilitate the process, a growing number of sales and marketing departments are beginning to work together to manage leads through to conversion.

This might involve co-ordinating a sales call following receipt of a specially targeted marketing email. Or it might involve sending an event invitation or a white paper to a certain section of the sales database. There is an infinite number of possibilities and it is different for every company. In some companies it is a fairly simple process; in others improved lead management requires investment in lead management (otherwise known as demand generation) technology.

Most people who work in sales and marketing have known for some time that increased co-operation and co-ordination in lead management can only be a good thing for both departments and for revenue figures. The challenge has always been to make it work – it is a challenge that many companies are finally beginning to meet.

Lead management at Vodafone

Last August, Deane McIntyre, Head of Online Marketing Programmes & Campaigns at Vodafone Global Enterprise, read an article in these pages about lead management technology. “It was a real eye-opener,” he says. “Before then I’d not really given any serious consideration to what it could do for our campaigns, but that article really made me realise it could be exactly what we needed.”

 

The Vodafone Global Enterprise division is dedicated to selling to multinational corporations and its 400-strong team works exclusively on delivering products and services to businesses worldwide. This produces challenges in the co-ordination of marketing and sales campaigns.

“Our focus is on acquisition within our existing client base as much as retention, and for that reason sales productivity is a hot issue for us right now,” McIntyre continues. “We need to do all we can do remove administrative obstacles from our sales team and ensure they have as much face time as possible with prospects.”

He adds: “Accountability is also crucial. We are keen to invest in our marketing and sales efforts, but in the current climate our finance team needs to know that those investments are generating a return. Anything we can do to prove the effectiveness of our campaigns is invaluable.”

At the end of last year Vodafone Global Enterprise ran a pilot scheme to manage leads generated by a third party. That agency identified additional C-level contacts within the division’s customer base that could be contacted to discover more information about the pain points that Vodafone could potentially address for them. Because the leads were well qualified, the resulting conversion rate was in the order of 60%.

Lynda Gillingham, Campaign Manager: Acquisition, who will be running this project going forward, says: “The technology we used in the pilot allowed campaign integration between our internal departments and with the external third party. It was a clear success, and we now have the green light to further broaden the programme to other countries.”

McIntyre adds this advice on how to make this type of campaign work: “Begin with a clear definition of success. Work out whether to buy or build and get the right partner on board. Ensure your salespeople meet the people who will be doing their qualifying, so they can be confident trusting them with their leads. Remember it’s not just a technology project – get the people and process in place as well as the technology and you’ll stand a much greater chance of success."

Dealing with complexity

At some companies it is possible to manage leads through a simple system that involves little more than a centrally-held spreadsheet and frequent meetings between a marketer and a salesperson. However, most companies have to deal with much greater complexity than this.

If you have more than a handful of prospects or there are more than a couple of people involved in your sales and marketing teams, or you are using a third party for any aspect of the process, you may find that lead management technology makes the process a great deal easier.

Stuart Wheldon, director of client services EMEA & Asia-Pacific at Eloqua, explains how that company's system works: “It gathers leads from a variety of sources – the website, email campaigns, search campaigns, telemarketing activity, direct mail responses and so on. Users create workflows, each with a series of actions that are prompted by certain responses. So, for example, the third time a prospect visits the website, the system might send him an email that goes into more detail about the area he's been looking at.”

He continues: “The system then uses all this information about prospect activity to score leads. Once a lead reaches a certain score the system passes that lead over to the sales team.”

Research provider Aberdeen Group has found that 73 per cent of top-performing companies now use a lead-management system to nurture, score, and route leads appropriately.

The benefits

When implemented correctly, these systems can help companies provide their sales teams with well-qualified leads about which they have extensive information. This improves the sales conversion rate, ensures a better return on investment, enables clearer decision-making on marketing spend and enhances the role of marketers, making them genuine partners to the sales team.

Sally Hewitt has recently taken up a new position as marketing director of international at Pitney Bowes, a £4 billion company that provides mailing products to companies in more than 130 countries. In her previous role, at the business insight division of the company, she used Silverpop's lead management technology, and she is making it one of her first priorities to introduce it to her new division.

“We used it for online lead capture, lead scoring and pipeline management,” she explains. “It allowed us to speak the same language as sales. We could map what a perfect customer looked like, see exactly which marketing activity worked well in which part of the EMEA region, and understand precisely which actions shortened the sales cycle.”

For example, the system revealed that the website produced the best return on investment and so Hewitt used this information to drive massive investment in that channel.

She concludes: “Above all else, these systems remove emotion from investment decisions. We're not just going to a show because we've always done it. We have the figures to show what works and what doesn't, and so our decisions are based purely on fact. That simple shift is enough to transform the way marketing is perceived.”

Getting it right

However, it is not as simple as buying a new system and sitting back and waiting for the sales to roll in. Like customer relationship management technology before it, lead management technology needs careful, well-considered implementation. Get it right and it can transform your sales and marketing efforts; get it wrong and it can become an expensive distraction.

Users have to define the inputs, set the workflows, and decide who does what. In simple terms, you must get the people and process right before looking into the technology. Too many B2B marketers are failing to recognise this.

Geoff Wells, products & services director at Slipstream, says, “We run marketing campaigns for the likes of Google, Microsoft, Intel and Oracle. We're being asked to use this technology increasingly frequently, and we're finding that too many people are rushing to plug in the technology without doing the groundwork of getting the people and processes right.”

He goes on to explain what that groundwork involves: “You need a shared understanding between sales and marketing of what a lead is, you need a clear division of responsibilities between sales and marketing and you need to work out how they will work together to nurture leads through to fruition. If you don't have that lead management system in place then no technology can help you.”

Just the beginning

However, once you have got your lead management system in place, the technology can be a very useful addition. It can automate a highly complex system, pull in leads from a variety of sources, across an almost infinite number of possibilities, and ensure every person has the information they need to sell or to market most productively. It can do all this much faster and much more cheaply than any one person ever could.

Looking ahead, as these technologies become ever more prevalent, and as the money-men demand ever greater results and accountability from sales and marketing, we can expect to see even more companies begin to focus on lead management. Those who are able to start early and do so correctly will gain an important headstart.

  

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