6 Reasons Why Everyone Needs a Lead Qualification Team
This is a guest post by Craig Rosenberg. Craig is Author of The Funnelholic, his very popular B2B sales and marketing blog. He is also VP of Products & Services at Focus where he oversees product creation, management, and delivery
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These days, there are lots of buzzwords being marketed as panaceas to Marketing ROI woes: lead management, marketing automation, content marketing, lead nurturing, etc. Don’t get me wrong, all of these things have major impacts to your marketing bottom line. But there is a big mistake: people are talking less and less about dedicated lead qualification teams.
In my years in the business, one thing has not changed. The most successful lead generation/lead management programs have dedicated phone resources whose sole job in life is to take raw inquiries and qualify them before they are sent to sales.
There are a couple of things you need to know upfront. First, marketing automation is not a replacement for lead qualification. As a matter of fact, marketing automation makes the lead qualification function more efficient, that is, they can qualify more leads for your sales team. Secondly, sending a list of “scored leads” to quota-carrying sales guys doesn’t work either. As you might imagine, I listen/read tons of content on lead management and I’ve heard this a couple times and it’s ridiculous. Actually, I take this back, you can do this if you want your marketing automation/lead nurturing initiative to fail. Lastly, no matter what you do, if you send unqualified leads to sales, you will either fail or get minimal ROI from your marketing programs. Period.
The key to every lead management process is to have a human tied to a phone-based function that sits in between lead generation and the sales team. What they do all day is follow up on leads from marketing and based on a set of qualification criteria, decide which ones should go to sales. You can in-source, outsource, I don’t care. But I do care if you send raw, unfiltered leads directly to sales. Here are the 6 reasons why:
- Sales exists to close business, let them do that please
Just look at the numbers: today it takes 3-15 touches to generate a qualified lead. That is NOT something you want your expensive, bag-carrying sales reps working on. Instead, you want them focused on closing business.
- Sales reps don’t want to follow up on leads anyway
They don’t, they won’t, and it’s a pain in the butt to get them to do it.
- You don’t want them to either
If you are a marketer generating raw inquiries or leads, your benchmark for success is leads-to-opportunity conversion or MQL (marketing qualified lead)-to-SAL (sales accepted lead) conversion. You won’t come close with sales doing their first voicemail follow-up. You want someone whose sole job it is in life is to reach your leads, overcome objections, make sure they are a fit, and get them connected to sales teams. We generate leads for 100s of clients, the differential of conversion rates between clients with lead qualification teams and those without is staggering. We have two clients who get the same leads, client with an optimized lead qualification and lead nurturing process converts leads at 40%. The other client, passing leads directly to sales, converts at 5%. (True story).
- You get the ability to optimize the process of “connecting”
Taking a raw inquiry and creating a qualified lead is hard but gets better with optimization. When you isolate this process, you allow for the process to continue to improve with lifts in conversion rates and ROI along the way.
- You get data
It’s amazing how many times I hear how marketers don’t get data because “sales isn’t updating their CRM.” With a dedicated lead qualification team, you get data…real data on your leads so you can optimize.
- It’s a tried and true method
I didn’t invent this. This process has been around for years because it works.
The message is clear: make lead nurturing a priority, create a lead management process, go buy a marketing automation product, but don’t forget the phone. Without lead qualification as part of your process, ROI will be elusive.
COMMENTS
Absolutely! The metrics say it all: 40%. conversion with a dedicated team doing lead qualification vs 5%. conversion without. It would be interesting to do a test within one company to really drive the point home.
Check out this article I read a couple of years ago, where author Dick Lee nails this concept right on the head. The other trick to getting more lead conversions? Get them while they're hot. And I mean, scorching hot. Don't wait 30 minutes, an hour, a day to contact new leads, especially Web-generated contacts. For Web-generated leads, you need to contact them in five minutes or less. And I know this because MIT says so.
Excellent post Trish. We have come to the same conclusion, and we see it as a best practice in our customer base (now 600+ companies, so it's a pretty broad sample). Would love to see a follow up post on "how to effectively qualify leads".
Oops, posted by Trish but written by Craig!
@Umberto, you ask we deliver. The next post I write will be on how to effectively qualify leads. Stay tuned...
Thank you for posting this Trish and thank you for writing this Craig! Our company sees this same challenge on a regular basis among our clients. One of the keys to overcome the phone gap problem identified is in proper training and adoption of marketing automation. Craig is right when this is applied to acquisition, "The key to every lead management process is to have a human tied to a phone-based function that sits in between lead generation and the sales team." However, when leads relate to existing customers with existing sales relationships we disagree and believe it's more important to think in terms of customer life cycle instead of opportunity life cycle. Lead generation systems are usually built around an opportunity life cycle model. This falls short and fails to acknowledge high-value repeat buying organizations. When a "lead" comes from a customer that buys frequently and often (e.g. weekly), that lead needs to go directly to the sales person. http://bit.ly/ayeen
I absolutely agree. Having built and run both sales and lead gen teams, it is imperative to distinguish and delineate roles, activities and goals. Reps have their strengths, and putting incentives and plans in place that maximize those strengths is a very good idea. Great post.
Another good one Craig. It is a sad state of affairs when you have to state the obvious, as you do here. The one thing though i really like is your use of the term "lead qualification teams" rather than inside sales. That best describes what those teams and people do. I actually see that more companies, in the B2B software industry are adding these people to their teams. In fact one of my really small clients is adding a part-time person to their team to do that function as well as handle outbound and inbound programs for lead gen. They will then have the lead qualification responsibility before they pass to their 2 person sales team. The function addresses so many issues we have been talking about the past 2-3 years: > Lead quality > Lead nurturing and management > Marketing<> sales alignment > Closed loop demand generation Thanks Trish for having Craig post this one.
This is great Craig thank you. I attended a webinar by Aaron Ross recently that suggested that even though you're adding cost (a common management objection to adding a lead qualification team) you'll actually increase productivity and efficiency by adding that layer. That said, what variables should I be considering to determine how much to pay somebody on a Lead Qualification team? Are there rules of thumb for a role like this?
Kevin, we publish reports on this very topic. You can find the 2009 Lead Generation Metrics & Compensation study here http://www.bridgegroupinc.com/lead_generation_metrics.html. We are about to release the 2010 version any day now so stay tuned!
Craig I really couldn't agree with you more on this. In addition to your points I find that even if you have an outside team that is willing to cold call and can do it well, you will have major ebbs and flows in your forecast. The rep works on building their own forecast via prospecting. When they build the forecast they then have to work the deals they have in their pipeline, which takes up all of their time. As they work to close deals, they don't have the bandwidth to build their pipeline for upcoming qtrs. As a result the rep is focused on building pipe and then closing pipe. In the months that he/she is building pipeline, they aren't closing and in the months they are focused on closing, they aren't bulding for the future. Again, great post. Nice work.
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