Brian Carroll, my B2b lead gen blogging idol, talks about this in his post: Closed Loop Feedback: The Missing Lead Generation Huddle. Brian is coming from the outsourced Call Center perspective and I am coming from the third party lead generation perspective, but the massive benefits are the same: The organization providing leads and the consumers of the leads (Sales) need to meet and talk WEEKLY.
Yes, I know, the Sales Team will give you annoying feedback: “This lead had freckles, so its not a lead”. But in between those annoying comments are the kinds of tidbits that both sides can leverage to refine and optimize the process. The leads dont do the talking and you cant live off the feedback from your automation. Conversations will usually yield really important holes that need to be addressed that get lost in automation.
So meet, and ask the important question: What’s working and what’s not working. Lead Generation needs to listen-filter too but listen. Both sides should be a/b testing new ideas to increase conversion rates.
What is sales doing when they get a lead? Sometimes just changing how Sales engages the lead after receipt can yield higher conversion rates.
What is marketing doing to prep the lead? Sales needs to know what marketing or lead development is telling the leads before passing….that can be leveraged for the next conversation?
How much effort is sales putting into reaching the lead? How many contacts were expected by them?
When is a lead dead? When is lead recycled back to marketing or lead development to work?
B2B Online is reporting that email list pricing is dropping..1.4% from last year. The title is deceiving, this doesn’t per se show that email blasts are decreasing in popularity but that there are more and more people providing this service.
Permission based email is $273/m is the number one list rental whereas second place is newsletter list which is $172/m which decreased by 3.4%.
b2bonline: E-mail list prices continue to slide, says Worldata
By the way: Is anyone still doing snail-mail???? That is dying a fast death, not a slow death…email while prices are dropping, usage is not.
Anyone in the business knows that Salesforce.com is a true post tech crash, on demand success. Aaron Ross helped build the lead generation, front-end sales process there. He has a blog I like and will likely refer to often: Build a Sales Machine
His article on “Clarity”, read: Clarity = Sales Success is certainly a theme in the funnelholic too. We discussed creating a clear, agreed upon lead definition…Aaron takes it farther talking about clear sales steps, and sales process.
Successful companies create clear, hard deliverables for every step of the sales process. That is what I have seen. example: To go from 10% to 20%, a face-to-face meeting must be set up. 20 to 30 Face-to-face completed with scoping document completed and so-on. I like how Aaron talks about the sales support process that back up the process steps.
Literally one document can support these processes.
Think out and make clear sales steps.
Write out the various sub-steps that support these steps.
Don’t advance in the sales process without a hard deliverable to support advancement.
As Aaron writes, “clarity” = success.
This is not on my blog to perpetuate any rumors or speculate on why, but Eloqua has named a new CEO. Eloqua is without a doubt going to be/is one of the major players in the marketing automation wave. The idea of “lead scoring” is buzzing and Eloqua is one of the best systems to support those types of efforts.
News is news, but watch out for Eloqua nonetheless:
B2B Online Article: Eloqua names new CEO