determining why most marketing leads fail to help sales determing why most... · “mql is any lead...

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Determining Why

Most Marketing Leads

Fail to Help Sales

This report is the result of the shared insights of over 100 senior executives in sales, marketing and operations who participated on a BizDev360.org forum sponsored by

Global Technology Sales Solutions and Peter Strohkorb Consulting.


Our Mission

BizDev360.org is a revenue generation leadership forum that provides sales

and marketing leaders a professional platform to share insights and opinions

on key areas that affect revenue generation.

The opinions shared by forum participants in advance, during and after each

live forum are collected, analysed and delivered to each participant in the

form of an insightful report.


Why Is It Important to Determine

The Reason That Marketing Leads Fail?

We chose to cover this topic because it is probably the most visible

attribute of misalignment between sales and marketing.

There has been a fundamental shift in the balance of responsibility in

the sales cycle from sales to marketing due to the buyers enablement

via digital and social media.

Why is lead conversion rates

important? Poor lead conversion

rates affects everyone in a business

organization including the partners,

channels and alliances. Poor

conversion rates usually go hand in

hand with poor customer

experiences.

Financial experts are seeing greater economic uncertainty in the near future, making it increasingly critical that marketing be able to align their results with revenue or else face budget cuts.


We asked our panel of executives the following questions:

Why do most marketing leads fail to help sales retire quota?

How do you define qualified? When is a marketing lead sales ready?

Who bears the bulk of responsibility for conversion…Marketing or Sales?

The responses we received illustrated clearly a genuine desire to

address this challenge and a willingness to sit down with the other side

to figure it out. What was interesting was that no one threw into

question the methodologies or techniques leveraged to produce

marketing leads.

Marketing and operations shared similar opinions as to why leads fail to

help sales seeing the issue as a matter of lead scoring and grading

calibrations. Many participants provided scoring/grading examples that

seem to mirror each other. From the perspective of sales viewed the

issue was seen as a matter of enforcing stricter qualifications standards

along with better validations of lead details.

There seemed to be a universal agreement between marketing, sales

and operations as to what constitutes a sales-ready qualified lead.

Nearly everyone detailed similar qualification guidelines involving

budget, authority, need and timeframe as the basic requirements.

Some alluded to having more advanced standards that included the

indication of intent and noted examples where intent was determined

via behavioral analytics derived from digital content and social media

vehicles.

The question around who bares the greater share of responsibility for conversions was where the groups had far different answers. The position of marketing & operations panel members was that if the opportunity met the basic guidelines of qualification agreed upon then the responsibility lays squarely on sales.

Sales told us that they should not be held responsible for the

conversion rates of marketing qualified leads and marketing ROI.


“We only pass sales qualified leads that have been tele-qualified and verified to have budget, authority, need and timeframe details outlined.”

“Once a lead has been determined to meet our mutually agreed upon criteria for qualification and has been validated by our inside sales organization, it can be deemed as sales ready.”

“If the customer is seriously interested in our products and has a budget to support a purchase, then we want it. ”

“We want leads that have validated information about the key decision makers and the business opportunity.”

“MQL is any lead that has meet BANT either via telemarketing or through our digital automation scoring and lead grading process. SQL is when all those details have been verified by our tele sales team.”

“The misalignment between marketing

and sales shows up in the caliber of

opportunities that are being generated...”


“Marketing owns the responsibility to ensuring real leads are delivered to us.” “Sales owns the final stretch to close a lead. Marketing

is responsible for sending us leads that are real and

qualified.”

“Our sales teams give each lead a thorough follow up.

Solid quality leads result in revenue. We just don’t

need the poorly qualified ones.”

“Both sales and marketing have a portion of the responsibility to making sure leads are worked thoroughly.”

“Sales is ultimately responsible for converting marketing

generated leads into sales revenue.”

“Marketing is responsible for ensuring leads produced

are qualified. Sales is tasked with trying to turn them into revenue.”

“Sales owns the revenue conversion part. We have little to no influence on what happens to a marketing lead we generate beyond a report pulled from our CRM.”

“We own about 40% of the responsibility the bulk is on sales to close our leads and turn them into revenue”

“As long as we ensure that only highly qualified leads


People buy from trusted advisors who

represent companies with solutions they

believe will help them be successful


Popular thinking in the digital marketing arena follows the argument that if

you know your buyers’ persona and if you ensure the buyer’s experience is

chalk full of relevant content, then a flow of self-qualified marketing leads

or MQLs will be the result. These MQLs can then be further qualified via

tele-sales thereby producing a sales qualified lead or SQL.

We know that most business decisions involve at least 6 key influencers.

When marketing delivers a SQL to sales using this singular methodology,

the engagement by sales will be at a serious disadvantage because the

SQL lacks the complete context of the opportunity at the organizational

level. In other words, the sales rep is going in nearly blind with limited

peripheral vision as to how the qualified contact and opportunity fits within

the holistic situation and the decision circles that surround the opportunity.

Without this holistic context and clear establishment of some level of

situational alignment with key stakeholders, the sales engagement is likely

to be unsuccessful.

How do these various singular engagements of SQLs become collectively

associated? The expectation may be on sales to begin that collective

engagement. It is for this reason less then 5% of MQLs on average result

in revenue success.


Digital and social media are powerful marketing tools. When coupled

with predictive analytics, marketing has a powerful tool to gauge

potential opportunities via persona behaviour or interactions.

Artificial intelligence or AI will enable marketing organizations to tap into

a global consciousness of trillions of interactions

helping to calibrate and enhance the effectiveness of

marketing collateral and digital content strategies.

Buyers have been enabled to gain direct and easy

access to virtually any piece of information needed to

research possible solutions and self-qualify

themselves. These buyers are commonly referred to

as blue-bird prospects.

Blue-bird buyers account for typically about 2% of the total addressable market of opportunities that funnel into sales. When you put that 2% average against the

average attrition rates of customers that are lost to competition, you will quickly see that relying on these types of leads alone is a dangerous

proposition.

Digital Social Marketing

• Provides Social Environment

• Builds Awareness

• Accessibility to information

• Business Intelligence

• Enables blue-bird prospects


Events and seminars add that physical social environment by which

buyers and sellers can discuss possible solutions. Buyers can get closer

to the potential solutions and get answers from product specialists.

Telemarketing is most commonly

leveraged today with friendly

personalities asking questions geared

at quickly qualifying a prospect’s

interest. There is a greater risk of a

negative customer experience with

telemarketing than the probability of

any positive impact to bottom-line

revenues.

Most call centers can not procure and retain the caliber of resources

needed to effectively engage buyers in a meaningful way. Nevertheless,

they are being leveraged to help quickly qualify MQLs into SQLs.

Relying on the problematic singular approach in complex selling

environments will result in most leads failing to help sales. The prospect

may meet the qualification criteria of having a budget, authority, need and

timeframe or BANT, but that doesn’t mean they will do business with you.

Until you become a trust advisor, you will just waste each other’s time

regardless if your solution ultimately is the better one.

Your competitors have the edge with

their history and trust this is built over

the years. These marketing vehicles

will not establish you as a trusted

advisor to gain a foothold in a target

account that has an embedded

competitor.


We all have read and heard plenty about the buyers journey and how

digital marketing has helped reshape that journey in a way that customers

prefer.

The business-to-consumer or B2C examples are plentiful. Take Amazon for

example and how it has impacted the retail experience forcing consumer

product manufacturers to establish direct to consumer avenues along with

their traditional supply chains methods.

In the business-to-business or B2B space, we are hard-pressed to find

tangible examples that reflect anything beyond the actual funnelling of blue

-bird buyers.

There is scarcely any evidence to show that through these singular

approaches could result in the establishment of a valued position effective

enough to help gain business out of target accounts. They simply don’t.

The reliance tends to be on sales to do the legwork of establishing trust.

Which is why sales tends to cherry pick which leads to pursue as each

engagement is time taken away from their own pro-active pursuits.

Resolving this issue is critical and a source of frustration for everyone including marketing, sales and especially the buyers.


It is critical to clearly understand

what these marketing vehicles can

truly do and what they frankly can

not do.

What these marketing vehicles will not do is help you gain the intimate knowledge of the buyer situation. This is needed to forge a relationship in a strategic way to enable you to implant in the buyers mind that you have their best interest in mind.


Many of you may recognize the term ‘Situational Alignment’ if you have taken professional sales courses or have read any books on solution selling.

The premise is as follows: In order to gain a trusted advisor position with a potential buyer, you must be able to position your solution in the framework of the buyers need using their language….not yours.

In other words, until you can embed in the mind of the buyer that your solution is truly a viable one to address their challenge, you will not be taken seriously. Even worse, you may be used as leverage against the embedded competitor who has established trust to help gain an upper hand in an upcoming acquisition.


We have all seen many versions of the sales funnels. This one is

taken from Global Technology Sales Solutions. It outlines five

distinct stages of qualification that will need to attained to

successfully gain traction within a complex selling environment.

The first three stages are clearly lead by marketing.


https://www.gtssdna.com/


The first stage is where modern digital content marketing backed

by powerful predictive analytics comes into play to help generate

awareness and impressions and hopefully some MQLs.

The real value at this stage is to help marketing organizations

identify their ideal target accounts or ideal customers. Through

demographic and behaviour intelligence you should be able to

determine with accuracy as to who is your ideal buyer persona.

Pummeling prospects with content will never help you build rapport. In fact, there is enough empirical research to show that doing so can have a negative effect on your bottom-line as prospects choose to opt-out of communication with you, effectively shrinking your addressable market.


The only way to establish rapport and gain insights that go beyond what

predictive business intelligence will offer is to pick up the phone and talk to

everyone that can bare influence on doing business with your company.

That includes both business-line and technological or directly related

contacts.

Yes, you heard right. Pick up the phone and actually call your prospects.

Once key contacts are engaged and insights are gathered, you can begin

assessing what buyer needs your organization can address and what

frankly you can’t.

Leading with those buyer insights, you can begin the next level of

marketing lead engagement which involves going deeper dive into the

target organization and the engagement of people with direct roles in the

initiatives.

By gaining deeper insights into the organization’s needs you should be

able to build a good model or outline of the decision-making circles

involved in the initiatives. This includes those who are the power

influencers and key stakeholders. A successful ABM strategy works to

build rapport with influencers within the key decision-making circles that

influence the key stakeholders.

Through this process you will gain knowledge as to who are the key stakeholders and decision makers. The key stakeholders will become well aware that you have done your homework and are in a position to provide

meaningful insights on their needs and challenges.


It is at this point that marketing communicates the opportunity to sales and

works hand in hand with sales to build a situational alignment strategy.

Marketing should arm sales with every bit of details gained relative to the

opportunity and the account including all the backend business intelligence

acquired. Together sales and marketing have a better chance to position

the solution effectively.

Since the existing rapport is with marketing, it is marketing that should take

the lead in scheduling an appointment with the key stakeholders and

sales. With the stakeholders well aware you have engaged nearly

everyone involved on their initiative you are in a solid position to be

genuinely heard.

If successful, sales would have been able to position your solution in the

framework of the stakeholder’s needs and enable the stakeholders to

begin internally and mentally aligning their needs to your solution. You are

now at the beginning stage of becoming a trusted advisor!

Here is the important thing to note. Marketing doesn’t relinquish their role with their target prospect or account. They would continue to work with sales and continue to funnel additional opportunities from the account that are ready to be aligned. Marketing hands the primary responsible for the account once the volume of revenue generated by this newly acquired account reaches a threshold whereby a dedicated sales headcount can be assigned to the account and the account can be considered a house account.


Each modern tools of marketing commonly in use today plays a valuable

role in helping an organization gain traction within an account. We simply

must understand their limitations.

In order to produce opportunities that sales can retire quota on, marketing

must employ a sophisticated ABM strategy that is holistic as opposed to

singular in process.

You will notice in the flow chat that BANT criteria are not gathered at one

specific stage but is attained in a fluid manner with budget usually being

the most challenging to pin down. In technology sales for example, the

budget determination can extend to well into the final decision process and

sometimes beyond.

The key to success is in building a trusted relationship with the prospect as you carve out the opportunity.


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www.BizDev360.org

Sam Momani

CEO & Co-host

Peter Strohkorb

CEO & Co-host


Peter Strohkorb is the Founder and CEO of Peter Strohkorb Consulting International, he is all about "Making Your Business A Customer Magnet". Peter has developed several proven methodologies and programs to deliver exceptional sales acceleration results to businesses of all sizes and in a wide range of vertical markets. In Peter's previous career he held executive sales and marketing positions for over 15 years in corporates such as Canon, Sony, 3M and CSC. His international work has culminated in a highly rated Amazon book published in 13 countries called the OneTEAM Method which describes why and how sales and marketing initiatives need to focus on the business customers, not on their products and services. Since the publication of the book Peter has become a highly sought after international speaker at conferences and corporate events. He is an acclaimed sales and marketing consultant and advisor and an experienced executive mentor. Peter's vision emanating from his book is a world where sales and marketing collaborate to attract more of the right customers.

www.peterstrohkorbconsulting.com


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