By Brian Carroll, InTouch

Many things with lead generation seem easier than they are. Take sales lead follow-up for example, research shows that sales people do not fully pursue around 70% of leads generated by marketing. That amounts to literally billions of wasted marketing dollars. The speed of lead follow-up is a major contributor to this problem.

KnowledgeStorm and The Artemis Group just completed a benchmarking study of best practices for pursuing online leads (registration required). They concluded, "Leads get cold quickly, so it is vital that vendors implement prompt, effective lead follow-up processes."

I’ve closed-the-loop on thousands of leads with clients and unquestionably, the speed of follow-up and the degree of lead acceptance by the sales team has a major impact on ROI.

One of my clients; centrally qualifies all their leads (via phone) against their universal lead definition with in 2-hours, distributes and requires their field sales force to follow up on those that are sales ready within 8-hours. They generate 12,000 inquiries per year, mostly via their website.

If a qualified sales lead is not followed up by the assigned sales person with in 24-hours, they can count on a call from their sales manager. If a sales lead goes more than 48-hours before being touched, that sales person risks having that lead assigned to someone else – someone with more selling time capacity.

Does that seem a bit too militant for your taste? Perhaps. For them it works. They have an amazing lead conversion rate, which is triple the amount of their industry peers. They are successfully beating three Fortune 500 competitors who are 50 times their size.

One final thought, If your sales team cannot turn leads back over for additional lead nurturing you are just throwing a lot of your budget on the scrap heap.

We have discovered that 30% - 45% of leads that were not considered viable opportunities by the sales team actually became sales ready opportunities within 12-months. This client re-captured a $1.2 million dollars per quarter in revenue by simply giving their sales team the ability to hand the baton back and recycle their leads.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Does size matter?  When it comes to prospect databases (a.k.a. "Rolodexes") the answer is yes, and mostly no.

Time and again I see companies who have very large prospect/client databases (a.k.a. Rolodexes) but have very little "relationship strength" with each (or sometimes any) contact in the database.  This makes the overall value of the database very low.

Firms (and their sales people) need to pay more attention to the quality of the relationships they have with each person in their "Rolodex" than merely to the number of people.  Firms should "institutionalize" systems for staying-in-touch with their contacts on a regular basis (at least quarterly).  From my experience you will nearly always build a trusted relationship with someone merely by consistently staying-in-touch over one to two years (of course, assuming you send them quality information).

So, when it comes to "Rolodexes" you need to "use it or lose it"...(And no, no picture on this post!)

Inspired by Fred Wilson's post - VC Cliche of the Week: I often hear people say about someone, "they've got a big rolodex". http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/05/vc_cliche_of_th.html

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Watch your prospect pipeline not just your revenue.

One of my favorite points from Ron Hubsher's "10 Sales Principles" event was that you need to keep close track of the number of deals in your sales pipeline and not judge the health of your sales efforts by this month's revenue numbers alone. 

Ron Hubsher pointed out that your prospect pipeline and your revenue are separated by your sales cycle.  Hence, if your sales cycle is three months, the health of your prospect pipeline today will determine the value of the deals you close in three months time.

Ron pointed out that companies often make the wrong marketing/prospecting investment decisions if they do not have a good handle on their prospect pipeline.  He used the example of a software company where this month's revenue was great so they eased back on their lead generation efforts only to find that their revenue in three months time was terrible.  Conversely they panicked when their monthly revenue was low and in fact their pipeline was healthy. (Note: click on the slide image to enlarge it and see the example.)

Companies need to have systems and processes in place so they can clearly understand the health of their prospect pipeline; otherwise, they will make bad marketing and sales investment decisions.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 05:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

By Jim Berkowitz, CRM Mastery

In A CRM/KM (Knowledge Management) Water Cooler, another new social networking software solution being targeted to marketing and sales organizations is discussed. The article notes the following:

Picking your employees' brains is one way to seal a deal, and it's the premise behind the popularity of so-called social interaction component of customer relationship management (CRM) and knowledge management (KM).

This is how Michael Chender, CEO of Coemergence, puts it: "There's critical information passed around at the water cooler, at conferences, in rumors." Capturing this information electronically can lead directly to revenue. For example, a Coemergence customer was recently trying to land a contract with a small Canadian company. "An employee in India happened to hear gossip about this Canadian company and their intentions regarding a certain project," recalls Chender. "The employee entered the information, it was sent out as an alert to Canada, and it ended up sealing the deal."

Chender believes that these kinds of human intelligence nuggets might fall between the cracks in a truly global company. "How do you know who to e-mail out of 30,000 people?"

While that may be true, it leaves unanswered the question of why companies should go through Coemergence for such information-gathering initiatives.

One answer is that Coemergence bundles several utilities into its product. For example, a partnership with Verity reflected in the upcoming 5.0 release of Coemergence's ACIS product allows users to couple search with opportunity tracking.

In this context, search is a utility designed to make it more attractive for users to work on Coemergence, for use of the product is seldom mandated by executives. That's why the vendor has worked to integrate the tool with Microsoft Outlook and provide the search feature, hoping to boost individual users' productivity and thereby become a part of regular workflows. But there is another reason why users find themselves motivated to work on Coemergence, Chender says. "For junior people, it becomes a way to show off what they know."

Coemergence and some other vendors are taking what can still be considered the first steps in trying to capture and monetize knowledge within existing collaborative workflows. The strategy has paid off for some early adopters, but there are a lot of untapped users out there. "The first go-round of KM scared a lot of people off," Chender concludes.

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"We rely on the deal fairy"...

This phrase comes from a conversation with a real CEO of a small software company.  I think it was very honest of this CEO to share this with me but it highlights a not-so-uncommon issue. 

Do you know where your leads are coming from and do you have a plan to systematically generate more?

In small IT companies, staff often fail to systematically ask prospects how they heard about the company and systems to record this information are frequently weak.  In big IT companies, systems, and people, are often so overwhelmed with the quantity of leads coming from multiple channels that they are unable to track all (or even any) of the information on how leads were generated.

Small IT firms in particular often lack detailed lead generation plans or their plans have been outdated by a change in their situation or market.  In both large and small firms, sales people often have no documented sales/account plans and just operate on instinct to find the next opportunity.

If you want to be successful at generating leads and sustaining your success, you will need to plan, execute, measure and analyze your lead generation approaches...and then start with planning again…

Relying solely on the "deal fairy" isn’t likely to get it done for long!

Posted by Sales 2.0 at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)