The Funnelholic

I hesitated to write this post, because Marketo’s Jon Miller has already written quite possibly the best, as-close-to-definitive guide to lead qualification.

OK, now that I have led you off my site, let’s get back to business. I decided to write this because I continue to believe in my heart of hearts that one of the single biggest levers a revenue-focused organization can pull is to have a dedicated phone qualification team. Also, I was cleaning out old paperwork and found some of my old notes from my days at SalesRamp.

First, some clarifications: I’m talking about a multichannel process that includes dedicated phone-based resources and automation designed to determine whether or not a lead fits the agreed-upon qualified lead definition and is deemed ready to speak with sales. Or CliffsNotes-style: There are people on the phones who qualify leads or inquiries before handing them to sales.

There are a number of different names for this: inside sales, sales development, lead development, telebusiness, lead qualification, and so forth. No matter what you call it, there’s a buttload of things to do when building an LQT (lead qualification team). I can think of at least 54:

1. Establish a business plan.
2. Create definitions; in particular, your qualified lead definition (more on this later).
3. Determine your “value-chain,” starting from revenue the organization needs to generate then go in order from there: a) Opportunities: How many opportunities do we need to hit the revenue number?; b) Qualified leads: How many qualified leads do we need to hit our number?; c) Leads or marketing-qualified leads (MQLs): How many leads do we need to hit our qualified leads number?
4. Draw the value chain from top of the funnel to the bottom.
5. Create metrics for each step in the value chain.
6. Determine your leads’ needs (demographics and so forth).
7. Determine lead/inquiry generation flow (what are the sources, etc.).
8. Figure out how leads will be entered into the system.
9. Establish the merged/purged database process.
10. Develop a list of prospects/customers not to call.
11. Develop a definition of a qualified lead. I know I mentioned this earlier, but it is the most critical definition — what criteria must you uncover in order to pass this lead to sales?
12. Sales has to agree to the definition, or nothing on this list will work.
13. Get a commitment from sales to follow up on the qualified lead. Some might call it an SLA (besides Dan Waldschmidt).
14. What is the deliverable to sales? Is it an appointment? Demo? What is the information provided?
15. What’s the closed-loop process? Sales needs to provide feedback on the qualified leads; try to do it using your CRM.
16. Create lead stages just like sales stages, but make them mimic the phone qualification process.
17. Develop the quota of qualified leads (as my old boss Stu Silverman called it, “The ‘keep-your-job’ quota”).
18. Develop a commission plan for the LQ reps. It should be a qualified lead number with a bonus for revenue generated.
19. Develop a commission plan for the manager.
20. Determine how to track calling statistics. Yes, sir (or madam), you need to do this. (P.S. You may or may not be able to do this in the CRM.)
21. Tie your qualified lead flow with the overall sales forecasting process.
22. Establish the territories for the lead qualification reps.
23. Develop “hang-on-the-wall” materials: value propositions, call guide including voice mail, qualified lead definition, competitive comparison guide, list of customers and partners, diagram of the field organization, buyer personas.
24. Set content-delivery strategy - what should be sent when.
25. Create scoring (this is if you don’t have marketing doing scoring). You should score on lead source, demographic info that hits your sweet spot (title, for example), and so forth.
26. Score will determine level of effort and time spent.
27. Create a “connect-strategy” that includes phone and email — a series of calls and emails over time.
28. Determine the number of voicemails you will leave (if any; some people don’t).
29. Create a web-researching strategy. Allot a certain amount of time to research each account. Provide an application to do research such as Inside View.
30. Create a process for inbound calls including call routing. (P.S. Here is to hoping you get inbound calls!)
31. Get senior executive staff to buy into the LQT.
32. Write all of this down in a strategy document. Not just to look cool, but for your own good.
33. Develop automation strategy, customizations, reports.
34. Choose a CRM system if there isn’t one. Figure out how to support your process if there is one.
35. Ensure you set up CRM to make lead qualification reps’ lives easier. They need to live in it.
36. Write an automation cheat sheet. Lead qualification reps should hang it on their walls.
37. Establish a process for tracking qualified leads.
38. Develop a lead source report — goodness of sources and goodness of follow-up.
39. Make sure leads are seamlessly entered into the system. Make sure lead qualification reps are alerted when they enter the CRM system.
40. Train, train and train: industry, buying personas, market, technology, product, company, your new lead qualification process, the automation, the message, objections.
41. Sit with the lead qualification reps; it’s the best way to help them.
42. Determine headcount.
43. Create job descriptions. Copy other job descriptions of like jobs to make sure you are thorough.
44. Advertise on craigslist, it works for this position. And send out word to your network. After you get one or two, pay for referrals. The average age will be young for this position, and the young’uns like working with their friends.
45. Manage the group toward hitting its goals.
46. Monitor calling. Use a splitter. It sounds invasive, but it works great.
47. Continually communicate goals and results to management. They don’t always get it.
48. On second thought, continually communicate to the entire company.
49. Have a closed-loop meeting with sales. It should be weekly. Accept feedback and do something about it.
50. Have a closed-loop meeting with marketing. It should be weekly too.
51. Have marketing listen to calls of their leads so they can see what is working/not working live.
52. Constantly optimize.
53. Expect a year to 14 months of maximum output from lead qualification reps.
54. Wake up do it again (think Groundhog Day).

I got the band back together: Tom Scearce (aka @TLOTL) and Chris Jablonski (aka @cjablonski). These are my partners in crime when creating long(er) list posts, and they certainly helped me here. We have put together a list of 26 reasons your leads are converting, and, as usual, we had some fun with it.

Before you read on, I want to make one point. There is typically one major issue to overall lead conversion: lack of lead management, also known as passing raw leads/MQLs directly to sales reps. I have yet to find an organization with legit lead management processes that can’t convert leads. They can convert co-reg, content syndication, you name it — because they have built an always-on lead management process to convert leads or inquiries into qualified leads.

One other point, this assumes you are producing at least reasonable leads/inquiries/MQLs.

With that in mind, here are the 25 reasons your leads aren’t converting:

1. You’re passing them directly to the sales team without an intermediate step or two (i.e., lead development or lead nurturing).
2. You don’t have dedicated resources (i.e., lead development or an inside sales team) connecting with and qualifying leads.
3. You haven’t tried to optimize what the lead development team is doing to convert your leads.
4. You aren’t leveraging scoring.
5. You aren’t leveraging nurturing.
6. You haven’t created a unified lead definition with the sales team (the term “unified lead definition” was coined by Brian Carroll @brianjcarroll).
7. You don’t have an SLA with your sales reps for what they guarantee they will do when you pass them a qualified lead.
8. Sales doesn’t care about you anymore and won’t follow up on anything you send.
9. You’re considering the wrong metrics when looking for optimization.
10. You don’t look at metrics at all.
11. You look at too many metrics.
12. You think your job is to get the most leads and the lowest CPL (cost per lead).  Right answer: your job is to create the highest conversion at the most efficient CPO (cost per opportunity).
13. You don’t have “conversations”— optimization sessions with your lead vendors.
14. You don’t have “conversations” — optimization sessions with the sales team.
15. You dump leads from different sources into an identical lead development path (@cjablonski).
16. Your shotgun marketing approach gives you a lot of quantity at the expense of quality (@cjablonski).
17. Sales disqualifies leads because they deem the leads too early in the sales cycle (@cjablonski).
18. Your value proposition is diluted, unreinforced, or at worst, forgotten as the prospect moves from inquiry through nurturing to sales follow-up (@cjablonski).
19. Marketing has no process for filtering raw inquiries and disqualifying those that don’t fit (at least closely) the ideal customer profile (@cjablonski).
20. Your sales team already has so many good leads on its plate, and sales reps would rather close those leads than sift through your mixed bag of suspects and prospects (@tlotl).
21. Your leads are going to inbound contact-center sales reps, and answering the ringing phone is always more important than calling out on your Web-captured “handraiser” leads (@tlotl).
22. Your leads were captured at a trade show two months ago and haven’t been nurtured or called since (@tlotl).
23. The first 100 leads tagged with campaign code “XYZ” were unreachable, unqualified or not ready to talk to a sales rep, and now any lead tagged with that campaign code is effectively blacklisted in the sales team (@tlotl).
24. You haven’t educated your leads with vendor-agnostic, third-party-sourced content that validates your solution in the marketplace (@tlotl).
25. You’ve purchased a targeted list of contacts or names, didn’t market to them and delivered them to sales — under the (false) pretense that they are actually leads (@tlotl).
26. Your leads are great leads, but they’re best suited for a product that your sales team is not properly trained, compensated or experienced enough to qualify. For example, your sales team is world class at selling a point solution, but you’ve delivered them (expensive) leads for a bundled offering (@tlotl).

Are there more?  We’d love to hear yours.

Here we are again. If you missed Part I, make sure to read it first. Once again, before we begin, I need to introduce the members of the band:

On the guitar, Tom Scearce (@TLOTL), and on the electric keyboard, Chris Jablonski (@cjablonski).

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Drumroll, please … Another ambitious post here: The Marketing Hipster Dictionary. When we started, I just wanted to create a post with some definitions of terms used in this blog and in the marketing space in general. Then we started having fun with some “originals.”

Before I go on, I must introduce my band. (Side note: I love when the lead singer introduces the band at concerts. I don’t know what it is — but I get excited.) On the guitar: Tom Scearce (@TLOTL). Tom is a brilliant marketer who understands marketing from brand to process. Follow him on Twitter. And on the electric keyboard: Chris Jablonski (@cjablonski). Chris can do anything. Period. And he does do everything, but he is not a dilettante. He does them all really well.

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