Confidence is the Feeling You Have Before You Understand the Situation

Posted by James Obermayer on Feb 28, 2012 6:49:00 AM

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James Obermayer, Executive Director and CEO of the Sales Lead Management Association and President of Sales Leakage Consulting is a regular guest blogger with ViewPoint.

There are many marketing managers blithely tripping along feeling confident about themselves and their accomplishments who have never proven the return on investment for lead generation. But someday, when they least expect it, the company president will say, “I’ve just read an article about how marketing spending can be proven to bring in a contribution margin of 20%. Are we doing that?”

Or the CFO will say, “I can’t support your new budget for the coming year until you can prove the ROI for last year’s spending.”

Talk about a confidence destroying discussion. If all the marketing manager has done is attend seminars and webinars, or read books on measuring marketing ROI, but never tested the advice, then her confidence may be shaken once she understands the new reality.

What’s a marketing manager to do? She has to stop talking the talk and start walking the walk. She has to decide that by measuring Marketing’s return on investment she’ll not only be the exception, she’ll become exceptional.

But this can’t happen unless you conquer another discipline (which is really multiple disciplines). The marketing manager has to learn how to manage all aspects of sales lead management. It is tedious, time consuming and unglamorous…but oh, so satisfying.

Fortunately, with few exceptions, lead generation programs always return the dollars invested—plus a handsome margin. But if you can’t manage the leads you can’t prove the ROI for Marketing.

If it were easy to manage sales leads, every manager would be doing it!

And yet, it isn’t that difficult. It means understanding the company’s CRM system and making it work (closing all records as ‘having bought’ or ‘died’). It means getting the cooperation of the salespeople to close out leads. It means having the best marketing automation system and making it work (cultivate, drip irrigation, nurture, foster, cherish or unrelentingly pursue until they buy). It means turning a buck into a buck twenty-five because that is what professional marketers do.

Fortunately, the best marketing managers know the odds of success for lead generation, and the odds are always in their favor but to prove it they have to manage the sales lead process (now that I have said it three times, I think you get the point).

Change comes instantly once the decision to change is made!

The actions required to create change and deliver the newly desired outcome can take time, but once the decision to begin managing leads and measuring Marketing’s ROI, is made, change has begun in that very instant.

The decision marketing management has to make is: Now that you understand the situation, now that you realize your career is riding on these decisions, when will you have confidence to prove Marketing’s return on investment instead of avoiding it? When will you start taking sales lead management seriously?

For the more competitive managers, I think the time to change is now. If so, it is time to change the saying to:

“Confidence is the feeling you have before because you understand the situation.”

Please tell us in a few words…what has happened to you since you made the decision to manage your sales leads and prove the ROI for your marketing programs?


Tell us what you think!

Topics: B2B Marketing, Lead Management, Marketing ROI, Guest Blogs


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