Here is our summary so far from this year.

1. Asking four simple questions and conducting that via email and twice within 48 hours of the lead occurring is working well. Try implementing a simple process that gets results!
2. Contacting sales after receiving feedback is providing more ”meat on the bone” than reported and helping to progress future lead quality and progression.
3. Please note, the feedback received is very indicative of how sophisticated sales and marketing are within each client organization when it comes to outbound lead generation and also how they are collaborating or not internally. Look for this within your own organization is sales involved, are they engaged in the program, willing to help?
4. The type of sales organization has really been differentiated in the channel versus direct. A majority of the channel lead feedback has been less informative (i.e. YES to a question versus an explanation of actionable next steps for their organization) Direct sales teams have been providing much more useful feedback and are in general more engaged. Ask yourself do you have this challenge at your organization with channel reps, channel partner reps in general not providing feedback?
5. Making changes to the actual sales process has allowed one customer in particular to move prospects within a 30 minute qualified call to a demonstration of their software. This is proving to be a solid jumping off point for their next sales progression goal. Ask yourself this are you providing strategy or guidance on the initial conversation goal after you have received the lead from a 3^rd party outsourced lead generation firm or internal inside sales team? Practice makes perfect so we are seeing progression as customers get comfortable with the excellent lead quality and volume of appointments they are receiving.

What we have analyzed internally was that a lot of decision makers simply don’t have the time, flexibility or data needed to make the correct or often best decision and instead worry about budget as the primary decision making criteria and perhaps experience as the number two factor. We recently digested a great HBR article on how to stop worrying about making the right decision but instead to figure out how to make really make your decision the right one once it’s been made by ensuring the success of the decision through your own efforts. You can read more here at HBR: https://hbr.org/2013/11/stop-worrying-about-making-the-right-decision/.

We couldn’t agree more with this approach. We went back and surveyed over 100 inbound web leads that never converted to clients over the past two years and the majority of the feedback received was that there was simply no decision made to pursue Teleprospecting as a tactic. Now we either didn’t do a great job showcasing our value or many of these prospects were not really ready to buy almost solely based upon a lack of budget and desire to really solve the challenges they have. This can be an agonizing and big challenge for most sales teams so we put pen to paper around what qualifiers we would enhance internally to avoid falling into sales processes with prospects that weren’t ready. We used three critical data-points or suggestions from the HBR article:

• Paying close attention to the feelings and emotions of the buyer as a key strategy and qualifier,
• Assessing how motivated the buyer is to work toward the success of our service and their offering
• How to make that relationship win-win and recognizing buyers that understand that no matter what option they choose, their efforts to support its success will be more important than the initial guesswork that led to either choosing us or another vendor.

It’s all about how to work together to make a decision that allows both organizations to drive toward success.

One of the key buying signs we here is what do you need from us to make this project successful? We often brushed over this question but now understand it’s a critical opportunity to gauge how much the prospect will help you be successful if they sign with you when things get tough. If you haven’t spent time on understanding how you are going to answer that question you’re missing a key qualifying opportunity. Here are a few questions we use.

• “Based upon your very recent past success in contacting new business accounts within Retail for example what made those companies chose to work with you and your company? Was it the ability to showcase a use study or case study relevant to their organization or how far are you willing to go to customize your sales presentation to win that account?”

If they can’t commit to helping further to define their strategy then they may just expect you to handle this on your own. We recently asked one of our client executives to help message further into a new group of decision makers that we were not targeting in the initial outbound calling effort. He not only jumped at the opportunity to help he improved our calling matrix, agreed to be available for more training if needed and truly spent time trying to help our call team with more targeted and unique messaging. Listen, he still cares about budget but it has helped tremendously and we value the partnership and are now avoiding spending time with the no decision or wrong decision prospect and instead focusing on the one’s that won’t worry about their decision but will work to help us.

So in effort to help you avoid our mistakes, here is the short list of what we came up with so you avoid hiring vendors that produce little if no value or results for your company.

1. Have you identified what you want to get out of the project or campaign?
2. Have you identified how you are going to measure success?
3. How does the vendor handle challenges that were unidentified before you started the program when they boil up?
4. Did you work together to determine strategy with the vendor overall?
5. If things didn’t work the way you planned it to how do you pivot to find success?
6. Have you targeted specific milestones?
7. What happens when communication breaks down?
8. What are the options for both parties to decide what to do next is it a one we street or a partnership?

We hope this helps and happy selling!

Often there is surprisingly quite a bit of alignment these days and we think Marketing is doing a pretty good job of working proactively with Sales on defining and scoping outbound campaign models before implementing them. When you think of harvesting leads and harvesting in general think about all of the work, steps involved, time and care that went to get that lead to Sales Accepted. It could have been a five month process, two years or 100 calls and touches to develop that prospect into someone now willing to advance with the sales team.

Vice President and Group Director, Demand Jay Gaines from Sirius Decisions mentions in his blog post on this subject that “The Sales Accepted Lead stage is typically overlooked because it is viewed as unnecessary and cumbersome. However, it should take no more than a few minutes of sales time, and it’s the best thing an organization can do to ensure that the budget, effort and resources devoted to lead generation are not wasted.”

The unnecessary and cumbersome flies in the face of all of the work put to get that prospect tot hat point. Here are our favorite ways to determine and harvest Sales and Marketing Alignment when it comes to Sales Qualified leads before we even start a project.

1. Has sales vetted and approved the list?
2. What is sales view of a good lead? A great lead? A long-term lead?
3. How would sales take and handle a good, great or long-term lead?
4. How much time can sales spend preparing for the call? Would they want more than these three qualifiers that we discussed?
5. What criteria or approval does sales have in persona’s that they want to meet with?
6. How many people are involved in the decision when it comes to purchasing how does or has that unfolded in the past?
7. How do you review the discussion after sales talks with the lead?
8. What is your process for getting approval from sales on appointments set?

If you can get those questions answered you are probably close to defining and setting expectations around Sales Accepted Leads from a position of strength. This can create a collaborative approach that develops agreement in the beginning and somewhat sets the rules.

Think of all of the brain power, effort and energy that went into executing a multi touch campaign, involving multiple tactics, tools and the amount of resources involved in getting to that point. As mentioned harvesting food right now is the fruit of a lot of labor, effort and focus for the past five to six months in many cases. So why not implement this type of approach to make sure you actually deliver Sales Accepted Leads. Enjoy your harvest!

Recently we underwent an exercise around ROI calculations with a CEO of a startup around in-housing still his demand generation through a few inside sales reps or outsourcing that function. ROI seems to be a leading discussion point these days for many business leaders who are looking to gain more revenue and increase profit on all fronts while managing expenses even closer. Interestingly enough and this does appear to be quite common, his perspective was driven from a human capital focus built around comparing his teams demand generation and pipeline creation over the last four months and arriving at a cost of lead that calculated into new business. So a simple formula, I get this many leads I pay these guys this much and this many led to new revenue. He then shared this information with us.

We looked at major gaps in process, approach, conversation rates, time spent emailing vs dialing, etc. Then we presented our numbers back to him based upon what he shared and it showed a potential deficit in leads to closed deals of almost 50% based upon our historic metrics of conversations to meetings to closed business. His analysis in response once again came back and had our model costing more than his team was internally even though ours didn’t.  So how did we translate this analysis?

We took a step back and really looked at everything from a different perspective because we were both blindly approaching this based on two different goals and seeming to fall right back into the pit. His goal was to justify keeping his team and also was including the cost of his direct team’s monthly costs in his model. Our goal was to showcase best practice and experienced driven metrics and also did not include his cost of his direct team because we felt that you can throw everything in at that point to justify the model to not be effective (i.e. rent for his building, his pay, his website costs, etc. meaning where does it end to determine the cost of sales relevant to ONLY lead generation) which as you can tell we are not aligned in the least bit. The main conclusion we came to was that when decision makers can cast doubt by blindly viewing things the way they want to view a predetermined outcome, then it’s almost impossible if not impossible to move them away from the way they view it as opposed to concentrating on facts.

At the end of the day, we actually see this a lot and we believe there are plenty of blind marketers leading their teams based upon what one could consider as blind decisions and often everyone falls into the pit because they have already arrived at the conclusion they wanted to arrive at, rather than looking at other options, tactics, facts, approaches, techniques, etc. So get your data points, metrics, facts and do more research and really try to make an educated decision that comes from many different perspectives versus blindly coming up with the outcome that you already know you think you know!

We think this is justified in many instances and very relevant in light of how slow marketing budgets appear to be increasing. Why would we expect budgets to increase when the ROI has not been there so the natural cause and effect is too raise higher expectations with what you are now afforded in the budget. According to Forrester they reported earlier this year that budgets will rise by 4% in 2014 however the report also detailed that marketing spend as a percentage of revenue was still down from pre-recession levels.

“The report, conducted in conjunction with the Business Marketing Association (BMA), found that marketing budgets will eek back up to 4% of company revenue in 2014. That’s still less than the 5% to 10% many companies had in place before the 2008 recession, but an improvement over the 2.5% Forrester reported two years ago.

“Business is just tightening its belt all around,” said Forrester VP and senior analyst Laura Ramos. “You have to really prove that you’re going to return value to the business to get more budget money.”

So, we asked ourselves how do you prove that you’re going to return value when so many marketing efforts are content focused or more importantly focused on generating little tangible value or next steps that are definable? More than ever marketers should be requesting detailed reporting, ROI calculations and actionable next steps from their vendors. A recent Aberdeen report predicts that marketers will be investing in marketing automation and other technology toward this end.

“An emphasis on accountability and smart spending will lead to bigger bets on marketing technology in 2014, Ms. Ramos said. According to the report, 61% of marketers “expect to increase the proportion of technology spend versus marketing communication/program spend”

What flies in the face of the Aberdeen report around technology spend is how do you translate that to show proven value?

Obviously within marketing automation software reporting is readily available, including dashboards that show activity. And activity can be that a recipient merely clicked on a form that increased his lead score without even considering the specific responses, just that they opened or completed a form. Activity, we think, rarely results in immediate proven ROI; instead it’s more of a branding move that generates lots of work for what typically turn out to be relatively few real opportunities.

And, while these systems report on activity metrics and returns, determining the timeframe for measurement is a fascinating dilemma. Do you send 10 email blasts and wait 10 months to evaluate the proven value to the business? Can you really track that 5 touches resulted in more business from the customer?

We encourage our marketing clients to implement proven tactics that give tangible results that are built on accountable financial models and contracts. Think about appointment setting, for example, that provides for shared risk or 100% pay-for-performance models where most all risk is assumed by your vendor.  

Imagine the next time you are building a presentation for your VP of Sales, CEO or CMO and you could highlight the 20 logos your marketing campaign set up for face-to-face meetings. Imagine you could show that you met with real people, with real titles and real needs for this amount of real money. That is the power of proven marketing tactics that if done correctly can continue to produce the results we all want and return value to our businesses.

When you hold a dozen or more sales meetings with well qualified buyers and don’t close any, it’s time to act. Unfortunately, our client’s action was suspending an otherwise very successful campaign. We are working on a proposal for a Lessons Learned campaign that will reveal the reasons they have lost so many deals. Then we’re back on track.

Sometimes we lose deals that we think we should have won. These lost opportunities are audited by someone uninvolved as a quality control measure. And it works. We recently spoke with a prospect that was very willing to provide candid, specific feedback about how we sized up against the competition, including a pricing discussion.

What did we learn? First, the call itself was a great brand booster for us as the contact said that he appreciated the opportunity and the fact that we “cared enough to call.” He also confirmed something that we read a few months ago in the Sales Forensics Report by Ask Forensics, that price was a very low consideration and that he was still planning to buy the most expensive proposal (still, from a competitor).

So, Why are Deals Lost?

Ask Forensics uses science to figure out why F500 companies lose deals. Their Sales Forensics Report is quite actionable based on their direct and in-depth interviews with 57 F500 companies about specific lost deals averaging $11 million. As we mentioned, the report predicted in 2013 that pricing would become less of an issue in 2014 – just what we heard, albeit from only one prospect.

Here is a graphic from the report that shows six reasons why these F500 companies didn’t win deals averaging that average $11 million.

 Know Your Answer

How much do you know about your number one answer to,

“What could my sales team have done to win your deal?”

Consider the divergent implications of each of these should a’s in terms of fixing it. The first one speaks to the need for high-level sales reps or engineers that can create and paint a picture of an intelligent, creative solution. Number three means product development or marketing work and the last one could point to a need for sales enablement.

The strategies and tactics necessary to fix each of these issues are vastly different and investing in a solution for the wrong one could actually exacerbate the overall problem. If you have no idea why you’re losing deals, you can’t fix what’s wrong. Do you know why you’re losing deals? If not, maybe you should find out.

Sure, your deals are somewhat smaller than $11 million and your budget is commensurately in-line so you can’t invest in an elaborate solution like the F500.

Maybe you could just pick up the phone yourself. Maybe there’s another solution.

We developed some new content for a campaign in May and called in our design partners. Well, with everyone having more highly prioritized items on their plate a month later we haven’t been able to get the email out the door yet. Keep in mind this is supposed to be going to a strategic list of 500 people that are good prospects for us. If we get the industry average of 2 or 3% we might get 1 or 2 people to fill out a form and maybe 10-15 to look at the email.

When we stepped back and took an objective view and considered likely outcomes, the time it would probably take to close a deal and the aggravation of dealing with all of the inevitable tire kickers, we felt this was a tremendous amount of energy and time wasted for what would be very minimal results. Making a few phone calls to past clients and old prospects took 1/100^th of the time and yielded more results.

Ok, to be fair we also decided to replace the MA system that we were using in favor of something that included basic instructions and works well. The previous system was so cumbersome that no one could take the time to learn it well enough that we would be confident in execution.

Recently, a major software company told us that their primary goal in marketing was to get more proactive and that they were going to meet with us to get ahead of the revenue curve. As it turns out, they had to abandon that goal (for the day, anyway) as they couldn’t attend a meeting with us because they were being pulled into another meeting.

Another call had our client’s agency estimating 5 weeks to deliver creative, data and start to execute an email campaign. This was a simple email. The pace of doing things right is very important but the more costly price is doing nothing especially if you look over your shoulder and you see your competition doing it.

We think it’s time to return to fundamentals. We use the Urgent and Important model now and scuttle the rest of the projects that we will never get to. Get your lead generation under control so you can try to develop predictable revenue. Think about what’s really worked for you, dependably, and look at what you’re doing now. Should you get back to fundamentals?

Read this excerpt from a write-up we submitted to a client for an upcoming face-to-face meeting.

“[The decision maker] is an integral part of the sales and marketing team driving process improvement and workflow. She is also well versed in CRM and has worked on CRM initiatives for previous employers evaluating Oracle, Salesforce, and Microsoft. She said that [prospect company] currently has no CRM in place and that they are only utilizing internal reports. She feels that since they are looking to implement a CRM in 2015 that now would be a good time look at [EP Client’s] service offerings, as they will be looking for outside support to help with this initiative.

Despite the fact that this prospect is responsible for implementing a CRM next year, our client doesn’t have any form fills or email opens or any contact with this prospect and wasn’t even aware of the initiative. Sure, our client may receive an inquiry in mid-2015 – when the prospect needs that third bid – but now they have a chance to influence everything from the budget to the requirements to the process.

Such is the topic of our first Infographic, ‘YOU’RE [IN] BOUND TO BE MISSING LEADS.’ We created it for the Callidus C3 show that included presentations on their marketing automation solution. We were hoping to generate a bit of controversy with people that we thought would be so wedded to the idea of “click and sell” that they’d practically revolt at the suggestion that their marketing automation doesn’t cover it all. To our surprise, we actually had a board member of a participating company refer us to his COO that is looking for ways to “make it happen” as opposed to only waiting for form fills.

Check it out here.

According to the CSO Insights 2013 Lead Management Optimization Study published a year ago this month, 86% of firms measured their lead generation success based on the revenue eventually generated from a lead source. If a given lead source isn’t producing revenue, it gets cut. This is up from 66% in 2008 when lead and/or meeting count was the metric.

An annual effort, the CSO Insights study polled over 600 ‘Chief Sales Officers’ from around the globe on 100 data points to develop a picture of what the best-in-class lead generators have been doing to build on their success. It also provides a detailed Lead Management Optimization Life Cycle that allows you to assess your organization’s performance in each of ten important areas. These insights allow you to conduct a self-exploration that can help you see where attention and resources need to be focused within your company to optimize lead generation efforts. It’s probably your best value for designing or fixing lead generation programs.

Examining Lead Source Alone Could Miss What’s Influencing the Loss of a Sale

Many factors influence the closing of a sale and you should consider those before stopping an entire program. This also goes for keeping lead sources that appear to be a good place to start. Lead

Psychology plays a big role in whether and the degree to which a rep pursues a lead and this should be examined first. Take a program that starts off providing low quality leads. AE’s who learn that the leads from this source require more work or have a lower probability of closing will shy away from them or reject them altogether. Even if the program is overhauled and becomes effective, your reps are likely to avoid leads from this source or, worse, work them such that they don’t close, which makes you conclude that it’s the lead source. Ensuring that your reps’ heads’ are on right can sometimes be the fastest and cheapest way to improving lead to close.

The CSO Insights report highlights the fact that now there are over four influencers involved in the average deal. The study outlines how successful marketers are responding and the basic strategies that they use to ensure that all direct stakeholders are being influenced simultaneously. But the basic question to ask is, “Is my lead source bringing in the right person within this group initially?” Generating leads at the wrong end of the totem pole or at only one end could be the issue. If the lead source is a trade show, perhaps the higher end decision maker doesn’t attend and that’s who you need to influence first. It certainly doesn’t mean that the trade show is a bad source of leads – lower level managers are often the most vocal about pains and needs. Perhaps this lower level lead source could have been used to find pain and the approach could have then been to the top.