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?
Get Buy-in From Your Stakeholders
Don't run marketing programs in a vacuum. Work closely with sales management and channel management to prioritize target markets, programs, and offers. Test-drive promotional copy, sales scripts, and sales tools with individual reps. Run product-specific copy and promotions by the product team to best represent business benefits to the end customer.
Publicize Incremental Progress
Resist the temptation to hold back good news till it becomes great news. Whether you use CRM dashboards or not, publish a brief weekly report (a few bullet points per project work well) to highlight both what's working and which programs need adjustment.
Schedule a 5-10-minute marketing programs update at the weekly sales call to share lead-generation, qualification, and conversion metrics—and to keep the communication lines open.
Stay Organized
You'll be juggling budgets, submission deadlines, copy revisions, and daily inquiries from the sales team. Most likely you'll be accessing multiple systems for search engine marketing, email marketing, and third-party list brokers.
Consolidate lead metrics and program calendars into a single spreadsheet. Leverage the company intranet or CRM document library to keep the latest scripts, talking points, and promotions within easy reach of the sales team.
For complex programs that require input and review from multiple departments, consider using a web-based project management tool.
Get Outside Help When You Need It
Direct marketing firms save you time, and often save you money, by negotiating lower rates for lists, advertising placements, and events. Many are skilled at writing call-to-action copy in minutes—copy that may take you hours to produce. Your CRM administrator or sales operations person can help you set up and fine-tune lead-to-revenue reporting.
Enlist your fellow marketers (internal or outsourced) for objective opinions and last-minute proofreading; in the heat of the deadline, you're more likely to miss obvious typos and errors.
* * *
You didn't take this job because it was easy. You're metric-driven because you want to make an impact.
What's your reward? You'll know that you played a pivotal role in your company's growth. Better still, you'll be able to quantify the impact you made, and exactly how you made it happen.
