Here's to you! You just got deputized to handle demand generation.
You're not sure if you should reach for the champagne, or the antacid...
From this point on, you're a metric-driven marketer; your success is measured by the number of leads you generate. Just don't take your eyes off the end game: revenue.
How can you avoid lead myopia?
Case Study: Too Many Leads, Too Little Training
After a sudden drop in sales, a technology company hired a direct marketing firm to drive 1,000 leads per week to its Web site. The direct marketers developed compelling ad copy, incentives, and customized landing pages for each campaign. Each lead was fed directly into the company's newly installed CRM system.
Since the company's overall sales pitch and product offering had not changed, the sales team was not trained on program objectives or lead-qualification criteria. Since the CRM system was brand new, no CRM consulting or software costs were factored into the marketing budget.
The programs quickly generated 1,200+ leads per week, which were automatically routed to the field sales team by territory. The eight field sales reps were pleasantly surprised. But once there were hundreds of raw leads in every rep's queue, they were utterly overwhelmed.
By week five of the campaign, the SVP of Sales put the program on hold to realign the lead-to-revenue process. Once the process was fixed, it took several weeks to win back the confidence of the sales team, which was convinced that all new leads were "junk."
What went wrong?
Because of the sole focus on leads, instead of revenue, there was no plan to guide leads through the sales process. The sales team should have had advance notice of the new programs, and it should have been given talking points and incentives to bring prospects to the next stage of the sales cycle. Raw leads (which haven't been filtered to exclude competitors, spam, duplicates, etc.) should have been pre-screened by marketing or qualified by telesales before being routed to sales reps.
In their haste to get leads in the door, marketing was guilty of under-planning and over-delivering. After marketing realized that it was only part of the revenue equation, it aligned its performance goals with that of the sales team.
How can you give lead generation a jumpstart, while keeping your sights on revenue?
