The Funnelholic

If you have read any of my previous posts or heard me talk, then you know how I feel about the importance of building a lead-development team.  But you can’t build a strong lead-development team if you don’t know the distinction between lead qualification and lead development:

• Lead qualification is the process of taking inbound requests and qualifying them before sending them to sales.
• Lead development is the process of taking leads attained from avenues such as white papers and convincing registrants to hear more from your organization and then qualifying them.

Today, you may have a lead-qualification team.  If the volume justifies it, keep the lead-qualification team.  However, if you want to succeed with third-party-generated leads (such as white paper or webinar leads), it’s time to build a top-notch lead development team.

There are many aspects to the process. First, let’s concentrate on the people.

Lead development is essentially a sales vehicle, so the people involved in this process have to be able to:

• Face rejection. Remember, the average third-party white paper converts from 4 percent up to 20 to 30 percent.  That means that a large number of these leads will not convert. Your lead-development reps have to be ready for a healthy amount of rejection.
• Overcome objections. See above. Just because you’ve been rejected doesn’t mean you should give up.  You’ll likely never receive the response “I want to be sold by You.” A good objection-handling strategy (see below) can help handle these contacts.
• Be engaging. Nobody buys anything from people they don’t like.  Plain and simple. The core trait of great sales reps is their ability to convince someone to do something they don’t want to do without their realizing it.
• Dial, Dial, Dial. The best sales development teams manage their reps by output.  Tailor them to your organization, but watch your numbers.  Work backwards from “passed to sales rep.”  How many connections does it take before passing a lead to a sales rep? Ideally one. How many attempts does it take to connect? You need to have quotas, and those making the calls need to be overtly aware of those quotas.

Where do you find these people?

• The “straight-out-of-college” model. I like this model a lot.  The lead-development team can be a farm team for your sales force.  The key to success here is training, training, training, as well as a real understanding of the “type” of person that will be successful. You need to follow your gut, because they usually lack tangible experience.
• The “stay-at-home mom and dad” model. This model is hot.  A lot of the outsourced lead-generation vendors are going to this model.  A number of my customers have built rock-solid teams using stay-at-home folks.  The key here is you can get lots of experienced reps.  I do not think this is the best model for low ASP (average sales price) or fast sales-cycle type sales, but more for larger deal size, enterprise type sales.
• Outsourced. People ask me this all the time: Outsource or in-house?  Outsourcing can work,  but it is not plug and play.  You have to put in the same amount of effort you would if you are building it in-house.  And it won’t work initially, you will need to come out of the gate slowly, but you can make it work over time.

Stay tuned for the next step: Process

The economy is the pits, and things are looking to get worse.  I can’t get up on my pedestal and convince everyone why, but I can say that when every investment bank on the street falls on its face, we have a problem. And these aren’t small players, by the way. These are institutions.

We can’t play dumb, we have to be proactive. What’s incredible is the forthcoming list is not much different than my previous posts. They’re just more vital, and if you haven’t considered these already, get with the program now.

The Funnelholic list:

1. Retarget: I am already hearing around The Valley that companies are making big changes in “who” they are trying to sell to. Companies whose revenues were tied to selling things to Wall Street and financial powerhouses have new targets in their sights.  Evaluate your market, because things are about to change.
2. Remessage from “nice to have” to “have to have”: In an earlier post, I commented on the difference between selling steroids (the nice-to-haves) vs. pain-killers (the have-to-haves). During the recession, you have to solve problems. Forget about trotting out exciting new technologies. The term “ROI” is losing its allure as a selling point. You have to dig deeper. Figure out what the real pain points are and be the pain killer.
3. Redefine: The qualified-lead definition will have to change.  I remember in ’01, the sales guys were still saying: “I only want budgeted projects with decision makers,” yet there were no budgets and  decision makers were all getting fired.  Recessions mean it’s time to evangelize and SELL.  The first reaction from buyers is to tighten those purse strings. You need the magic touch to open them.  Selling becomes harder.  One of our clients who sells to SMBs is telling me what used to take 1 guy and 3 phone calls to make a deal, is now taking 3 guys and 10 to 15 phone calls to sell.   Open up the lead definition to let more people in.

I only have one thing to say: “It’s on.” Your life is about to become exponentially harder. Retrench so you’re ready for the Brave New World.

Marketers ask me all the time the benefits of thought leadership, and I have only one thing to say: “Make it happen.”  When it doesn’t work, it’s often for a number of reasons:

1.    Poor execution.
2.    Not enough effort. In b2b, there really is no such thing as over-exposure.
3.    Poor choice of superstar – a.k.a., your thought leader. The one who is going to fill the house, put butts in the seats and pretty much make your brand the equivalent of a household name.

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One of the rules that I have tried to maintain has been not to use the blog as a way to shamelessly promote my company’s services.  With the exception of webinar promotions, I have done that fairly well.  Today I want to talk about Whitepapers.org, which belongs to Tippit’s family of Web sites.  There’s your disclaimer. However, I feel like this post still fits within my ethical rulebook because posting your white papers on that site is free.

1. Join your first revolutionary movement: No one else is out there on the Web trying to take on Whitepapers.org’s big, hairy mission, which is to put “all the white papers in the world in one place”
2. Or just jump on a bandwagon: 1,000 white papers posted in one year with no marketing or advertising.  That is what I like to call organic momentum.
3. It’s doesn’t cost a cent, so ­— duh — why wouldn’t you?
4. You can post anything , well not everything, but close. This is not merely a technology white paper site. Horizontal topics are free game. For example, check out “The World’s Worst Executive Photos” by some dude named Chips O’Toole.

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