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.
Put another way, tell me with whom you associate professionally and I will know if you can prove the return on investment for marketing.
More specifically, tell me how you manage your sales leads and I can tell how successful you will be in marketing.
You see, managing sales leads involves a system, not one function. The definition of a system requires that it be made up of elements called an assembly of resources and procedures. Ask an engineer in your company to define a system and he or she will tell you it includes:
- Resources—such as budget, the lead generation resources, human resources and the software that manages the system.
- Procedures—the marketing and sales rules of execution, and the ROI projections.
Systems exist when parts, relationships and a purpose exist.
Parts—sales inquiries, leads, software, and fulfillment.In the case of sales lead management we have:
- Relationships—marketing, prospects, suspects, salespeople, buyers and the connections between all of these.
- Purpose—to fulfill a customer’s need for a product or service and give the company a predictable return on investment for each marketing dollar spent.
Ask your company engineering managers to map out and solve the sales lead management problem and they will most likely take a systems approach. They will start with requirements (create leads to create sales through inquiry generation and nurturing); map out the behavior of the marketing department, prospects and salespeople; architect the solution (from inquiry to ROI reports); and voila—you will have a fully functional sales lead management system that will give Marketing the ROI projection for every dollar spent on lead generation.
It will be fully functional if some parts don’t fail. The parts most likely to fail in this instance are sales people that fail to follow-up sales leads and marketing which fails in lead generation (quality) or measuring the return on investment.
Of course your engineering department (and its systems engineer, if you are lucky enough to have one), will insist on a ‘Verification and Validation” of this lead generation system designed to create sales. If the verification and validation turns up flaws (salespeople who do not follow up inquiries and leads, salespeople who do not report on lead disposition, a marketing department that does not measure ROI), then the “engineer” will go back to adjust the system until it succeeds with an ROI for the company.
Airplanes and medical instruments, submarines and drones, tanks and trains are all built using systems engineering. Why should sales lead management be any different?
But first Marketing must make some new friends. After all, Marketing can be judged by who its friends are and how it manages (designs, verifies and validates) the sales lead process. Maybe a new friend for marketing can be a systems engineer right in your own company.
Topics: Lead Management, Sales Leads, Guest Blogs
