Closed-Loop Marketing Success: All About Leads

Having trouble closing deals? Start by mastering lead management. Photograph by Neubie.

Excelling at closed-loop marketing requires using CRM to:

• manage multi-channel campaigns
• track responses rates and results
• dynamically adjust campaigns based on results and responses
• nurture contacts with more targeted and relevant messages
• score prospects
• promote high-scoring prospects to sales leads as likely buyers
• gain feedback from sales through a lead pipeline program
• measure and adjust lead scoring/promotion based on real results (to understand opportunities and revenue)

Marketing departments must do the above, then rinse and repeat. Of course, that’s a lot to master.

Required Marketing Capabilities

Based on our extensive marketing experience, we’ve found that to excel at the above, your marketing program must master the following five capabilities:

• marketing measurement
• lead management
• event management
• campaign management
• marketing strategy

Five Steps to Better Leads

This is a big topic. So let’s break it down, starting with lead management—the practice of how you qualify and route a prospective buyer to the correct sales team. To do this effectively, you must master the five aspects of lead management:

• Intake & augmentation: Get people to opt into your marketing, and know which specific organizations to target. Along the way, maximize lead quality by ensuring profile content is complete—using self-disclosure and third-party data sources.
• Marketing qualification & nurturing: Pre-sales, determine (by scoring leads) whether or not you have the right target, based on whether they have the required ability or service. If they don’t meet the threshold for becoming a bona fide sales lead, nurture that relationship or lead. Often, this process is quite automated (for example, emailing a quarterly newsletter to everyone in your lead database).
• Pre-sales qualification & nurturing: As with marketing qualification and nurturing, once a lead exceeds a certain score threshold, nurture the lead using more manual—and thus costly—efforts (for example, telephoning high-value prospects).
• Lead distribution: Using defined business rules, route leads to the appropriate sales channel and representative.
• Measurement and quality: Measure the effectiveness of all of the above, to ensure that it’s as effective as possible.

To improve your lead management program, analyze how well your organization handles each of the above five requirements, and ensure that each is working at maximum effectiveness as well as connecting properly with each other.

Tackling List Quality

As an example of what counts as effective and well connected, take intake & augmentation. Let’s say, like many of the organizations Innoveer works with, you sell to other businesses. And like many companies operating in B2B markets, one way you acquire leads is by purchasing lists. (In fact, there’s a multi-billion dollar industry devoted to selling leads.) Unfortunately, however, roughly 60 percent of the data in those lists is junk. As a result, many list buyers waste a lot of time sorting the wheat from the chaff.

The most advanced lead management practitioners, however, take both a manual and an automated approach to lead intake and augmentation, to decrease qualification efforts while increasing lead quality. They still procure information from public sources, or purchase data directly from information brokers such as Dun and Bradstreet. But before qualifying, nuturing or distributing those leads, first they focus on data quality, using a mix of automatic and manual techniques:

• Automatic validation: Software such as QAS can automatically validate the address of an individual or company—perhaps the company frequently relocates, so part of the address information is incorrect, or perhaps someone mistyped the nine-digit zip code.
• Manual validation: Many Innoveer clients (as well as Innoveer) transfer data to a relatively inexpensive location, such as India, for validation, using automatic tools backed manual processes, such as picking up the phone to query leads directly.
• Crowd-sourcing: Interestingly, new Web 2.0-era approaches also help organizations acquire and validate leads. For example, a new company called Jigsaw helps organizations crowd-source their contacts, based on an equity system: upload valid information, then you can download valid information.

No matter how you procure leads, and regardless of your lead validation techniques, the ultimate requirement is to only load high-quality lead data into your system before proceeding to lead nurturing and distribution. The underlying rationale is simple: the higher the lead quality, the greater the likelihood that sales teams, partners and channel suppliers will not only snap up the lead, but run with it and capture the maximum possible wallet share at each customer.

And that’s the real point of an effective lead management program: to sell more.

Learn More

Succeeding with lead management starts by ensuring that sales and marketing teams working together on lead management—and not just having marketing throw its leads over the transom to sales. Read our 10 best practices for lead management.