The Funnelholic

First let me say, I have NOT talked to Bulldog about re-printing their funnel. One of the CRM analysts I work with, Adam London, sent this over to me as a great funnel. He is right. I have always liked Bulldog’s marketing tactics from branding, educational materials, and their nurture emails they send me. I also like their offering, they basically work with their customers as a value-added webinar provider. They do everything from audience development to scoring to presentation.

Like I said, they have a great funnel.

Here is the webpage this was found on

This funnel is trying to represent the fact that if you don’t follow up immediately with leads, 50% will fall out of your funnel. With Bulldog, their scoring system tells you which leads need to be engaged with sales immediately. Good stuff, except what I liked about this funnel is that it represented something much more to me. Broken funnels can come from:

• Ineffective hand-off processes — my favorite and most recommended is to build a highly optimized Lead Development team. That’s right HUMANS whose job it is it both connect with and qualify leads.
  • In VoIP, where I sell a ton of leads here is what I am seeing:
    • Companies with Lead Development Teams never complain about “not reaching leads”
    • They always have 10-50% better lead-to-sales opportunity rates
    • 5-20% better total ROI on ALL lead sources.
  • One company we worked without a lead qual team and then with one after is a perfect example. First let me give you the scenario, the VP of Marketing was buying leads all over the internet. They had a 20% lead-to-sales opportunity rate and 10% ROI against all lead sources.
    • What was amazing was: lead sources they thought were terrible, became successful
    • Their lead-to-sales opportunity rate moved up 25%
    • 15-17% ROI
    • Happier sales guys
    • No lead drop-off.

Bulldog’s reference to scoring is an equally important part of the marketing-to-sales connection but I just don’t believe it fully keeps the pipeline from breaking…in conjunction with a lead qual team you will re-align your funnel

And thanks to Bulldog Solutions for letting me use their funnel…please go and check them out.

This is soo random, but I am reading one of our employees blogs and she has the great post about dealing with admins. She had a bad day with the admins as you can tell….but anyway. I liked it.
I personally enjoyed this one:

Don’t get pissed at me because that communications degree from that 2 year you attended didnt get you that PR dream job in LA you wanted. Do me a favor and fake a smile and press *227 and transfer me, okay?

Anyway, good read click here for Erikakali

It brings up a good point: The ADMIN and her (rarely, but some

One of the main reasons for this Venture Capitalist/Silicon Valley gold rush towards marketing automation ultimately stems from B2B’s inability to create a fully automated, reliable closed loop process. Neither Salesforce.com nor Sugar CRM are very good at it though they can be gerry-rigged to get close. Again, the recent success on the internet with B2C pay-for-performance advertising is leading the charge and as usual B2C is ahead of the B2B game. The B2C companies do a great job of following lead to sale because they have to and they can. Vonage pays publishers and ad networks $30-100 per sale you bring in. From the reg page to the close, their system keeps a closed loop tab on your lead.

B2B lead generation are typically more complex sales that don’t lend themselves as easily to clean closed loop process. And furthermore, if the marketing department is doing their job, future customers are coming to their site via webinars, email campaigns, etc…that is, they are getting touched more than just once. These multiple touches make things tricky.

So does the reliance on the Sales Team to correct track and update leads in your CRM.

So does the subjectivity of the Sales Team against even the “tightest” lead definition.

This is our life.

Some beginning steps:
1. A unified lead definition is vital and a great first step.

2. The next step is to get your automation to best support your process. More on this in future posts.

3. The anecdotal Closed Loop Meeting between Sales and Marketing. See Elusive Closed Process Part II.

So, this guy, Brian Carroll, has a great B2B Sales and Marketing Blog that I hope to bite from quite a bit. As you know in the blogosphere, biting is actually honoring and I will always link back to his articles. He covers alot of things that I live by in my day-to-day life in B2B marketing. This is not one of his newer articles, but it is one that is near and dear to my heart — creating a unified lead definition. I cannot agree with this article more. He details some of the steps along the way to creating this definition, but I would say at a high level is:

1. Sales and Marketing need to come to agreement on the definition. Frankly, part of the key to this agreement will affect the type of quantity sales may receive. In other words, if you put too many restrictions on the lead definition (has to be C-level, has to have budget responsibility, etc), this will affect the number that Marketing can/should agree to.

2. The definition drives everything. Brian is right: the definition needs to be blasted out to everyone. Once decided, relevant parties need to know this. NOW, proper targeted marketing programs can be developed (what lists to buy, where to get registrations, etc) and the handoff is cleaner and lead-to-pipeline conversions are higher as sales can be prepared for what to expect.

3. Define More. My experience has been every step from marketing to sales should have a definition and that definition should include who handles what.

Read: B2B Lead Generation Article on the value of a clear lead definition