Magnus Marketing Blog

Following what is broken in marketing, another point. Too often marketing is rewarded or compensated on "QUANTITY" not "QUALITY". CEO's, VP's fall in love with people who say, I generated X number of leads per quarter or exceeded the quota/goal. Too often they fail to ask the follow up which is of those X leads, how many turned into actual business? The answer is "I don't know". Why?

1. Lack of communication between sales/marketing. As a marketing manager, I was privy to all the sales reports, forecasts, and meeting notes, plus I called the guys regularly to ask "what happened to such and such a lead". Joint sales/marketing meetings were held every Monday with the responsibility of the salesperson to discuss his accounts and leads.

2. Lack of ownership and point people. One person over each activity or an aggregator should be responsible for lead management. This person should assign the rating to the lead, decide if it should pass to sales (follow up on who received the lead), place it back into the marketing "warm up", decide if it is worth more research and specific targeting. They are accountable for the lead's management.

3. Lack of process. Conversion process mapping helps move leads through the process of qualification and closure. Leads attracted by advertising or "run the list" campaigns, need further qualification by telemarketing. Qualified leads in telemarketing can pass to sales and/or be tagged as invites to events/tradeshows for in-person meet-up. Leads from events/tradeshows need follow up calls and can pass to sales. Various support communications at each stage need to be implemented at each lead level to stay in front of the group targeted. Process or a programmed approach creates efficiencies in tactical deployment.

Sales always has quantifiable measures in place, so it is a matter of linking those measures back to the source and the "work" done to achieve it. Sometimes deals do fall thru due to client changes, sales deficiencies, or other issues. That should be tracked and known also.

Rewarding people for QUANTITY isn't the answer, quality is more critical.

The other approach is to eliminate a lot of extra activity and implement a research-based approach. :) That works also. When I was at Hexaware, I managed to drop about 1/4 of the budget using the targeted approach. That is for another post.