No Leads get Left Behind

Hi Paul,

This comment is a little off topic from your post, I apologize.

I read your blog via my Google Reader and noticed in the “by” field it said “by noreply @ blogger.com” is that something you’ve done on purpose or is it a default setting on blogger? I’m curious because I’m noticing more and more bloggers are avoiding leaving email addresses available on their sites.

No problem. It does have your name in brackets {Paul Dunay}, so that’s something.

And here I thought it was some clever marketing ploy I would need to study. 😉

Paul,
I have the highest regard for the work you’ve done in Buzz Marketing. Commenting on your post is like telling Elvis he is a little off key.

But, here goes – you are a little off key. When all you own is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Marketers tend to squeeze everything into conventions that they know and understand… like “leads”, “lead nurturing”, “sales ready lead”, etc. Salespeople live in the real world. All they care about is who’s my prospect, what is his pain or opportunity, where is he in his buying process and how do I persuade him to move through his buying process and select my solution?

If my well-traveled memory serves me, the 2008 McKinsey research indicated that marketing is generating 30% of the deals that close. That means that the salespeople are generating 70% of the business. Why is this so disproportionate?

Could it be that while marketers are generating, qualifying and nurturing leads, the sales professionals are busy a) prospecting to ideal prospect companies, b) developing prospects into opportunities, and c) closing those opportunities? If there is one customer buying process how can you have two selling processes? And which one is more in alignment with your customer? More productive?

The thought leaders in sales, and sales executives in leading B2B companies, are wrestling with a dramatically different selling landscape. To risk a well used cliché – the internet changed everything. Much of your prospect’s buying process now occurs on the web … long before they ever speak with a salesperson. As a marketer, you can treat them like a generic lead until they are “sales ready” (code for “are you ready to buy?”), but then you are too late. Some other, more aggressive, sales person has already engaged with your prospect and built a trusted advisors relationship. You are what we call “column fodder” in a pre-decided evaluation.

Or, you can recognize that your prospective customer is engaged in a buying process and out-dated marketing concepts are no longer useful. The new reality is a one-to-one, relationship based “prospect development” selling model. CSO Insights does a good job of investigating and documenting these changes.

So, what can a marketer do to avoid becoming irrelevant to sales? For starters, forget about leads and think about sales opportunities. Focus on developing a community of ideal prospective customers. Then reach out and build relationships. When an ideal prospective customer shows interest, give your salespeople the automation tools to engage with their prospects early and develop them into opportunities. Track the entire integrated revenue generation process via conversion metrics. The interactive analytics-based technology required to do this is available and it is cheap. What is missing is the shift to Web 2.0 and Sales 2.0 thinking – building personal 1-to-1 relationships, as opposed to nurturing generic “leads” until they ready to buy.

Please excuse my presumption in correcting such uniformly accepted terminology. However, if we don’t change our language we won’t change our thinking. In thirty-five years of professional sales and marketing I have never seen a bigger disconnect between our customers buying process and how we serve them.
Brock

this is good stuff. I have been preaching the same thing for quite some time.

lrmguru.blogspot.com

Brock

Well – first I would like to thank you for your comment – I had to read it several times today to make sure I internalized all the great points you made so sorry for my delay in responding.

You raise some extremely valid points that I totally agree with:

1) the disproportion of leads between sales and marketing
2) having 2 selling processes and only one buying process
3) Nurturing while other more aggressive sales people are in working the account

But where I think we are in violent agreement is in (using your words) ” creating a community of ideal prospective customers and reaching out to engage with them “

To a large extend this is the way we approaching lead nurturing.

I am not sure we are that far off so the only point I would highlight on top of what you said was this:

It needs to be a 3 tier approach
– Sales on the front lines
– backed up by Marketing
– and underpinning it all is the lead nurturing system that is taking all the leads that would normally “die on the vine” and making them come to life

thats where I think this fits into the selling process as a single unified process to match the buyers buying process.

Cost of sales is also an SG&A item (along with marketing) and if a system link this can surface some good leads it pays for itself – so why wouldn’t you have it running in the background?

Paul, email me the details at [email protected]. It sounds fun.

By this marketing we can get so many products in the market
calypsoramesh
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Social Media Marketing