This blog builds on a previous blog titled Sales and Marketing Alignment Requires Agreement on Lead Definitions. It describes a metric driven approach to get sales and marketing excited about working as a team to put qualified deals in your sales team’s pipe.
Whether you are building your sales team, outsourcing sales, outsourcing lead generation, outsourcing sales nurturing or sales qualifying, all the focus needs to be closing business. As we discussed in Sales and Marketing Alignment Requires Agreement on Lead Definitions, there are three steps in sales and marketing alignment that that will ultimately give your marketing team a sales quota:
The first step in building Sales and Marketing Alignment is to agree on your Ideal Customer Profile.
The second step is to agree on definitions for early stage leads, which are:
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) – Accepted information.
- MQL Hot – They are actively digesting the right message and content in multiple ways.
- Sales Accepted Leads (SAL) – There is a fit between the customers pains or needs and your product or solution. It makes sense for telesales to invest time in.
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – Established decision making process, budget and/or path to budget
- Nurture – Have expressed interest and legitimately not yet ready to buy.
The third step is to make sure that the marketing team and telesales team understand that they have a shared job, which is:
- to put deals in the pipe that can eventually close
- to keep as many leads in play until they are ready for sales
- to get deals out of the pipe that will never transact
- to avoid generating leads that will never transact
- ultimately to keep the steady state pipe at a volume that keeps the sale team at maximum effectiveness
The way we frame the jobs for our outsourcing lead generation and marketing teams is they always need to be creating measurable momentum with a focus on moving deals towards qualification and ultimately, the close. The different jobs are:
- MQLs = Momentum Makers – have the effect that starts momentum
- SALs = Momentum Builders –have the effect that increases momentum
- Nurture = Momentum Sustainers – have the effect that prolongs momentum
The other positive outcome is the lead generation reps stop filling the pipe with leads for lead volume’s sake and they become self-critical of squandering time, energy and resources on tactics that they deem as:
- Momentum Breakers- have the effect that stop momentum
- Momentum Takers – have the effect that sap momentum
- Momentum Fakers –have the effect that stage momentum
The lead generation reps, inside sales reps and marketing coordinator’s collective scorecard is based on Sales Qualified Leads. What emerges are statistics the team can leverage on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to identify what’s working vs. what isn’t working. . Here is what the early stage metrics would look like specifically for an aligned marketing and telemarketing organization following up on a Webcast.
The power of measuring it this way is manifold, but quickly here is how I would read this:
- Total calls to contact means the list is solid. Good phone numbers. A momentum sustainer.
- The ICP profile is solid as is the initial script because 65% of the conversations we are having are moving forward and that’s a momentum builder.
- The content is a winner because over half of the conversations we are having are accepting additional information.
- Voice mail as a tactic is definitely a momentum maker because we have a 3% return.
- Finally, Voice Mail is now a strategy that we need to totally commit to because 67% of those return calls are hitting the pipe.
Bottom line with this approach: you can measure both the team and the individual tactics so both the individual and the team successes are acknowledged simultaneously.
