Who should own phone-based lead generation/lead qualification?

I may have to do a post: “What should we call phone-based lead generation/lead qualification”? I call it “sales development” and that will be the case for this post. In my opinion, it is one of the most tried-and-true best practices for well-oiled revenue machines.  The job of sales development is to identify, connect with, and qualify leads.  Once sales development has determined that a lead is qualified, they “hand-off” the now qualified lead to the closer (sales).

Sales development has been on the forefront of my mind recently. I just wrote a well received post on the TOPO blog on why sales development teams fail.

So I love, support, recommend and help build sales development teams. One vexing question for me has been “who should own it?”. For this post, I have done three things: First, to understand where these teams report today, I borrowed data and information from The Bridge Group Inc.’s Lead Generation report. Secondly, I reached out and asked inside sales influencers and practitioners for their take. Finally, I did a poll with sales, marketing, and inside sales people to gather some of my own data.

The Current Scenario

As I mentioned previously, these charts and data are courtesy of The Bridge Group Inc.

First thing you will notice is that currently the vast majority of sales development (called lead generation in the report) report to sales.

lead generation, lead qualification, sales development

Interestingly, The Bridge Group Inc’s report shows that the activity mix is a major factor in deciding where a sales development group may report.  Sales development teams primarily report to sales when the main process is heavy outbound prospecting but marketing is the more likely owner (it’s close) when the main goal is qualification of inbound leads. From the report:

 

Sales development, lead qualification, lead generation

Expert Analysis

I reached out to inside sales influencers to get their take. I asked the question: “Who should own phone-based lead generation/lead qualification (sales development)? Sales, marketing, or it doesn’t matter as long as there is an owner”.  The analysis is interesting:

The “it doesn’t matter as long as there is an owner” camp:

Trish Bertuzzi from the Bridge Group Inc

We don’t care where the team reports. The only criteria is that it report to an organization that has the expertise, passion and bandwidth to pay attention to it.

The “it should be owned by marketing” camp

Jon Miller from Marketo

  • Aligned incentives. At the end of the month or quarter, marketing and sales development are concerned with leads and pipeline creation, while sales cares about whether or not deals have closed.  It’s in your best interest to align these incentives up the SDR management chain.
  • Streamlined measurement. When sales development reports to marketing, it makes it easier for marketing to be measured – and compensated – for creating sales pipeline. This is because marketing is responsible for everything before pipeline (e.g. they are only one step away from their goal).   When sales development reports to sales, it puts marketing’s key metric (sales pipeline) two steps away from their control.
  • One throat to choke. From a management perspective, putting marketing in charge of sales pipeline development can do wonders for eliminating finger-pointing. Put another way, if marketing is responsible for lead follow-up, you can say goodbye to “we sent over X leads; they just didn’t follow-up well.”
  • Better closed-loop feedback. Increased synergy between marketing and sales development means increased transparency around lead quality feedback, which is essential for refining the process.
  • They play by the same rules. Like B2B marketing, lead qualification is a number and metrics game.  Why place a golf ball on the tennis court when it’s intended for the green?

Matt Heinz, Heinz Marketing

The Pros

  • Marketing is closer to revenue responsibility by owning greater portion of sales cycle
  • Sales can focus only on qualified opportunities
    *If your inside sales team is focused on qualifying leads, make that a marketing function and allow your sales team to focus on selling.

The Cons

  • This is a sales management job and that is a skill marketers typically don’t have
  • Sales development management is a full time job and few marketing organizations plan for or expect this time of commitment
  • Marketing needs to commit resources (creative, content, training, tools) to the success of the sales development team
  • Sales leadership typically don’t like the idea giving up what they view as part of the sales organization

The “it should be owned by sales” camp

Tom Scearce, Sr. Product Marketing Manager

Sales should own it but marketing should fund it. And sales and marketing leaders must co-present regular status updates at the executive level. It’s too important of a function — because getting it right  requires considerable investment and coordination over a sustained period — to be left to one or the other group. Through sharing these budgetary, operational, and readout responsibilities, sales and marketing are strongly encouraged to agree on execution details, expected outcomes, and the metrics that will be shared with their peers.

Chris Snell, Inside Sales Manager, SMB at Care.com

I believe sales development sits right in the middle of marketing and sales.  They filter all of what marketing produces (the MQL), and because they work so closely with sales, they know what does and doesn’t make a prospect an SQL.  Sales should own lead qualification because of the desired result of the lead; a closed deal.  Marketing sends all leads, all potential targets to sales, (who should own training and development of teleprospecting), and the phone team sifts through it all like a ’49er looking for gold.

Gemma Mailhot, Head of Inside Sales at BMC Software

It can work in either area, however two key reasons to have it in sales. One, if you want a top notch sales development team you want them to be more like sales people then marketing people. Two, to attract the best of the best…..they need to have a career path and 90% of the best sales development reps want to be in sales not marketing. There are several other reasons why you might have it under sales but to me those are the key reasons.

Lars Nilsson

IMHO, if the role in question is to use the phone or email to generate “sales” activities, like meetings, appointments…then the role should reside in sales.   If the role to is qualify in or out marketing leads for then another role to do the actual follow-up, then I think the role could end up in marketing.  This (latter) role is more of a data-scrubber, lead flow manager, lead triage’r, than an activities based sales person (Former).

Survey Results

I sent out a survey to inside sales influencers and practitioners to “take a vote”. It seems that sales continues to be the place to be for sales development:

sales development, lead generation, lead qualification
My take

Do you mind if I hedge a bit? My preference is for marketing to own as much of the demand generation process as possible and allow sales to focus on closing qualified leads. For that reason, I lean towards having marketing own the group. However, like Trish, I just want organizations to have a sales development group, and I have seen sales organizations run these types of groups extremely well. So: I prefer marketing and completely support sales ownership. (wimpy, but truly how I feel)

What’s your take? Let me know in the comments field…

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic and a co-founder of Topo. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

The b2b buyer is sad and lonely and the Gracey Temperature Scale: Madlibs w/ @Peter_Gracey

I love the AGSalesworks team. Good guys who crank great content and a sense of humor. They really get inside sales, sales, and marketing – I was pumped for Pete’s Madlibs and I was not disappointed – This Madlibs with Pete Gracey is really funny with fresh perspectives. You know the kind of person you feel like you really want to drink a beer with? Well, Pete, I offer the immortal words of Bill Murray as John Winger in Stripes: “I want to party with you cowboy”. Madlibs with Pete Gracey: [Read more...]

Sales Worst Practices: Three phrases I don’t want you to say anymore

Quick update: I am tired and I missed a post this week.

Well, enough with that. Today, I felt like making a list of passive aggressive sales sayings that suck. My inspiration: I got hit with “checking in” today. Two days ago, a sales rep asked me if I “read some product specific collateral” he sent and I wrote back: “Dude, you really thought I would read that? Come on. Call me today and be a man.”Prospecting

Here are the three sales saying I don’t want you to say anymore:

1. “Just Checking in” — I am going to create a shirt: “Checking-in is for Wimps”.  Here is my tip: Use your brain and come up with something way more compelling than “I am just checking in”. I mean it. If you are about to check in, take a deep breath, study the prospect or call notes, and decide on what you want to say that has equal value to the buyer. When you check in, you are offering nothing and only taking. If this is a stalled conversation or you haven’t heard from someone, then send some arresting or thought provoking content instead. this works.

2. “I want to follow up and see if you got my (fax, proposal, email, etc)” — Dude please.Really? That’s why you are calling? Do you think that they didn’t get your email, phone call etc? (And don’t say: Well Craig, they may not have.) No, the buyer knows [Read more...]

Cold calling is broken not dead: Madlibs w/ @bridgegroupinc

I love Trish’s quote below: “I am a card-carrying member of the outbound mafia.” Actually, Trish Bertuzzi is not just a member but the Godmother of the Outbound Mafia and an unchallenged authority on b2b inside sales. She is also the Godmother of the”Tells-it-how-she-sees-it” Mafia. It’s a great combination because she likely to tell you something you didn’t know but should know – even if it hurts. I love that. Her Madlibs are classic. Enjoy!

1.    The b2b buyer is way too busy to be bored by you. If you can’t invest enough time, or worse yet, find anything interesting to share with them then leave them alone.

2.    The biggest innovation in sales is that there is no big innovation in sales – it just gives us something to talk about. Great sales skills and process have been around since the beginning of time. The tools of the trade have changed  – heck the wheel changed transportation – but moving the ball forward in a meaningful way still requires the same level of thought and execution.

3.    The coolest thing happening in b2b sales is that Inside Sales has finally arrived. I feel like an overnight success thirty years later! [Read more...]

Don’t let the ‘cold calling is dead’ crew drag you down: Madlibs with @srichardv

I say it time and time again: The best people to pick up prospecting tips from are the appointment setting guys. Steve Richard from Vorsight is one of those guys. I personally learn a lot from the tips and tactics they are willing to share. If you are in the business, you should too. Here are his Madlibs:

  1. The b2b buyer is overwhelmed and, as a result, more unaware of their needs than ever.  How do you help someone realize they have a need that they didn’t know they had five minutes ago?
  1. The biggest innovation in sales is a deeper understanding of the buyer’s journey and how to align selling activities to it. [Read more...]

Social Prospecting and Don Draper: A story about getting that hard-to-reach client

I have a very simple rule for prospecting: If you want to know tactics and best practices for getting to hard-to-reach prospects, then listen to the guys who run appointment setting organizations or outbound call centers. They do this for a living at scale.

I was putting together a preso for Sirius Decisions with Mike Damphousse from GreenLeads. He is the master at prospecting. He explained to me how they have changed their approach and then provided an A-MAZING example.

The game is changing, even for the outbound masters

Buyers just don’t pick up their phones very much anymore.   I talked about this problem in one of my earlier posts on cold calling. If you walked into an outbound call center two years ago, you would see reps staring at a list of people to call and making hundreds of dials.  They would hang up on voicemails and wouldn’t dare spend the time to write emails. [Read more...]

Best Practices for Highly Effective Demand Generation: #Demand2013 feat @heinzmarketing

Join Matt Heinz on May 15 at 10AM PDT or watch his presentation on demand anytime in the window below! hashtag is #Demand2013


Demand Generation 2013: The New State of Enlightenment

Demand generation is about to hit another plane right now. It’s time to have fun being a marketer again. Before I continue, please allow me to provide you with my brief but incomplete history with demand generation.

It sucked being in marketing.
[Read more...]

Cold Call, revisited: Best practices for getting in the door

Cold call versus not cold calling ….blah, blah, blah

The purpose of this post is to talk about the art and science of reaching out to someone who doesn’t know you. Call it what you want.

First, let me start with a couple important notes:

  • Inbound marketing works.  It does.  It creates great, cost effective leads.  Who doesn’t want someone to walk into their store?  I did not write this to say “you shouldn’t commit to inbound marketing”.  Stay tuned, there are more considerations on the topic but I will recommend inbound marketing til the cows come home.
  • I don’t believe quota-carrying sales reps should spend their time reaching out to people they don’t know.  Organizations should invest in either an internal inside sales function in charge of reaching out to and qualifying leads for the direct reps or hire an appointment setting organization or an out-sourced tele-organization to do it instead.  It just takes too long.  Should sales reps prospect? Yes…but if you have sales reps filling their own pipeline all day you are taking away valuable selling time.cold call, warm call, prospecting

Below are the reasons and scenarios that re-inforce the need to outbound prospect:

  • To grow your business, you have to reach out to people you don’t know and don’t know you.  If they aren’t downloading content, then you have to try something else. Welcome to reality.
  • Inbound leads are the best, but if you are sitting around waiting, you will go out of business.  Inbound marketing takes time and only the best in the business have reached the kind of scale you need to eliminate outbound prospecting.
  • If marketing is happy giving you 30-50% of your pipeline, do the math.  You have to generate the rest.
  • Here is the big one. If you are selling to a specific type of customer, then you will have to knock on their door.  [Read more...]

“This Week in Sales”– Video interview with Kevin Gaither

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8hG4-fATfw&w=560&h=315]

This is my interview with Kevin Gaither on This Week in Sales. It was awhile back but I haven’t had a blog in awhile. I had fun in the interview and I am just getting back into getting the Funnelholic up and running.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter