salesforce.com inbound lead management best practices - blackbox revenue

Leveraging Tele-Sales For Marketing

Part I: Inbound Lead Management Best Practices

Aaron Ross / Erythean MartinBlackBox Revenue

wwww.blackboxrevenue.com aaron@alloyventures.com

erythean@gmail.com

Never waste a lead

Experience

Plenty of leads, but then what? 

Contacting and converting your leads?  

Leads never get called, or get only a token effort? 

Collaboration with sales?

Here’s you right now

When we’re done.

The problem:

80% of the time, lead management

(processing & qualifying leads coming inbound to your company)

is the best place to quickly increase pipeline and marketing ROI

Three Too-Common Bottlenecks1. Diluted ownership of the marketing-to-sales

“baton pass”– Who owns the qualified pipeline metric?

2. Under-investment in “Sales Development”– Dedicated inbound lead qualification function – It’s less sexy than marketing budget or quota-carrying heads

3. Tasking the same reps to both qualify inbound leads and attempt outbound prospecting

– Oil and water

Waste of Energy

GARBAGE

How Do You Stack Up?

• Best in class 30% 30% 90• Average 20% 20% 40• Underperforming 10% 10% 10

Do you know? ? ? ?

Lead-to-OpptyConversion

Rate

Pipeline-to-CloseWin Rate

Of 1000 leads, #

that close

1. Treat salespeople as internal customers• Fewer, better leads = more revenue & higher ROI

2. Build a “Lead Management Machine”• Common language and metrics with sales• A dedicated sales development function • Well-designed tools and processes• CRM best practices

3. Commitment• Executive understanding & support• Pick one thing to start with and DO IT

(4. And a back-of-deck bonus)

3 Takeaways

Panning for gold

…With a colander?

It’s more like this

“80% of marketing efforts to generate leads are wasted and ignored by sales“

-Aberdeen

"A majority of sales leads are wasted every day, and 69% of sales leads receive no

follow-up at all”- Brain Carroll

How can you plug theholes?

Salespeople

Salespersons’ shoes• Salespeople constantly prioritizing• They will call current customers before suspect leads• 80/20 rule:

– If less than 20% of the leads are ‘highly productive’ right away, they might de-prioritize that entire source of leads

– It’s not the # of leads, it’s the average quality that is critical

Simplicity• The better the average quality across

all leads given to sales…• The easier it is to follow up on leads…• The more sales will follow up &

close…• The higher your marketing ROI goes

Sales: “Don’t Make Me Think”

What to doYour choice: A) Get frustrated, or…B) Consider them as customers

How can you deliver gifts that sales is consistently excited to open?

Do “less”,Qualify more

• Give quality, not quantity – less is more!• If you don’t have one, create a sales

development role• If you have a sales development role, improve

it’s qualification criteria and process• Train (and train, and train…) salespeople on

your CRM system and lead processes

Best practices

TaxonomyEveryone uses different terms…here is how we use some:

• Lead– A suspect who registered on your website (or responded to a marketing campaign),

but has not yet been qualified• Opportunity

– After a lead is qualified, it is an active sales opportunity • Sales Development

– A function that bridges marketing and sales. Sales Development’s core purpose is to process inbound leads, and route qualified ones to the correct salespeople.

• Inbound / Inbound lead management– the flow of leads coming “inbound” to your website, either because of marketing

programs or word-of-mouth.• Outbound / outbound prospecting

– Tele-marketing, cold-calling, prospecting…an inside salesperson is proactively contacting cold or stale accounts

Start here• Define a common language with sales

– What’s a “lead”? What’s a “qualified opportunity”?– What are each group’s commitments to each other?

• Create a sales development role to qualify leads– Separate “inbound” from “outbound” [!] – Estimate one rep per 400 relevant leads/month

• Excluding junk, wrong markets, duplicates, etc.

– Comp: 50% monthly goals, 50% on revenue

Agree on a few, most important metrics

Most Common:• Inbound lead volume (leads/month)• % of leads converted to qualified opportunities• Qualified pipeline generated per month

– And what is needed per month to hit revenue goals

• Pipeline-to-close rates

Measure these metrics monthlyThese metrics should also be further sliced by

type of lead or market segment

CRM best practices(principles)

• Leverage tools in stages: – First do more with your CRM system– Then worry about adding in ‘extras’ such as Ringlead, Genius…

• Avoid perfection!– Make it usable and maintainable rather than perfect

• Use dashboards (across the company)– Especially in meetings instead of excel – drive adoption– Create one for your CEO

• “Adoption boosters”– Training, laminated color handouts, contests, donuts…

It’s a journey, not a destination

Executive commitment• Common roadblock: executives with pure

enterprise sales backgrounds– “Website leads are a distraction” (a real VP Sales quote)

• YOU have to believe first!

• Educate them, relentlessly– Dashboards for visibility of issues– Results-based analytical tools (see bonus section)– Demonstrate before-and-after results

The water’s fine.

DIVE IN!

1. Treat salespeople as internal customers• Fewer, better leads = more revenue & higher ROI

2. Build an “Inbound Lead Machine”• Common language and metrics with sales• A dedicated sales development function • Well-designed tools and processes• CRM best practices

3. Commitment• Executive understanding & support• Pick one thing to start with and DO IT

(4. And a back-of-deck bonus)

3 Takeaways

Next month: Part II

You’ve dramatically improved inbound lead management…

…now you want better results from mid-market/enterprise leadgen.

How can you leverage tele-sales to break through the clutter and generate more qualified leads?

Aaron Rossaaron@alloyventures.com415-312-2579www.salesmachine.blogspot.com

Erythean Martinerythean@gmail.com

Design: David Stychno (david@c2llc.com)

Coming: BlackBox Revenue

Thank You

Appendix

2. Separate the core functions

OUT

AccountManagement

BoundQualification

SalesSales Development

MarketingGenerated Leads

BoundProspecting

IN Qualified Opportunities

New Customers

Aaron Ross

aaron@alloyventures.com

415-312-2579

www.salesmachine.blogspot.com