Eli Manning and B2B lead generation
CAVEAT: I know equating the most popular piece of news to your blog topic is pretty corny. Nonetheless, I think there is something we can learn from the Giants victory over the Patriots Sunday. (for those of you who don’t know, the New York “football” Giants beat the undefeated and seemingly unconquerable New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.
The point is that anybody can beat anybody on any given day. I am a big fan of unified lead definitions, but I am not a fan of ultra-tight lead definitions that leave no room for “upset”. Ill give you an example, I once did an lead generation implementation where the client wanted only Tier 1 manufacturers with X number of revenue, and x number of products, etc. One day, Yahoo came in. No one would take the call. Finally the Sales Development Rep got a Product Manager on the phone with them and came back with the realization this is a great target. 6 years later the company’s number one vertical is online media.
ESPECIALLY if you are an early company, don’t restrict yourself to too many “psychographic” traits. Your job is to bring in as many people who would be the Patriots (perfect targets) and could be the Giants (not entirely perfect on paper, but worth the Sales team’s time). Dont limit yourself to only Patriots, and find away to get the Giants in there because they may become your biggest customer yet. The one exception could be if the sales team’s pipelines are already and always full with near-term deals (dig deeper, this isn’t likely to be true but could happen at a mature company in a mature market).
The other caveat is that is you are still letting sales limit your lead definition to only deals that they can close tomorrow, you are screwed so I can’t help you. Sales has to be willing to sell and if not, you don’t have a true partnership.
If you can create leeway to find the next big “upset”, victory can be yours.
Written by Craig Rosenberg - The FunnelholicSign up to receive emails when new articles are posted
Want to connect directly? Email me at craig AT funnelholic.com<
