I'll begin with what has been the IT industry analyst's favorite answer to every question for years -- "that depends." In an ideal world or organization, polices, processes and tools such as marketing automation solution would be woven into a safety net to guarantee that (to paraphrase a former US president) no lead is left behind. Reality often differs from this ideal, unfortunately. To close the gap requires commitment from senior management and inculcation and evangelism across the organization of the understanding that leads have both important business value and limited shelf life.

(This brings to mind an ancient, but at least slightly relevant joke. "How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one -- but the light bulb must really WANT to change." The same is often true regarding the attitude about leads held by sales teams at some organizations.)

The tools available at the Focus Marketing Automation Resource Center (at http://www.focus.com/product/marketing-automation/) can help such efforts. This topic was also a recurring theme during the recent Focus Analyst Briefing on "Making an Informed Decision about Marketing Automation," available on demand at http://www.focus.com/webcasts/marketing/focus-analyst-briefing-marketing-automation/.

Good question, Catherine, although I think your question answers itself much of the time. When one generally throws something 'over the fence' in hopes of something happening, any control of outcome has been lost and all you have is hope.

This mystical 'fence' between marketing and sales has been the conundrum of many organizations. Marketing inquiring of Sales 'What did you do with my leads?' and Sales firing back at Marketing 'You call those leads? Give me better!'. What needs to happen is the removal of this fence. And marketing automation is bringing it down.

Marketing automation software is bridging the gap of marketing and sales. Many marketing automation vendors, including Net-Results, also integrate their solution into CRM systems such as Salesforce. This way, Sales can understand how and when Marketing has properly nurtured, scored and managed their leads to a Sales-presentable state, and Marketing can track the progress of these leads during the Sales process, and adapt and evolve based on lead behaviors. No more shrugged shoulders or finger pointing. Two groups cohesively working together to bring efficient results to their company.

The days of throwing leads over the fence are dwindling due to marketing automation and demand generation systems.

It enter's a No-Go nurturing program, aka lead recycling.

:-) There's a ton being written about it..

Wow, great responses as I enter the world of marketing automation. I've met with my director of sales on this to challenge our internally-created CRM system and to see how it can better address this issue. Thanks for the insight!

There are many things marketers can do to ensure lead success, the hot automated way is described by other commenters -- marketing automation. The other one most commonly used is a tele-qualification team, that is, a group of phone based people tasked specifically with following up and qualifying leads before they are handed to sales. The bottom line: passing leads directly to sales will kill your conversion. If you put marketing automation in front of it (lead nurturing) that will help, but combined with someone on the phone as a front line resource to unqualify the garbage is the most potent combo.

Hi Catherine:

Great question. Some good feedback has been provided already. One thing that I would strongly encourage you to do is:

Get the sales and marketing team together in a room and decide what constitutes a LEAD!

Until you do this, marketing will continue to bitch about how sales never follows through with the great leads they gave them, and sales will continue to bitch about the crap leads they always get from marketing. Been there, done that, many times.

In many (but not all) organizations, a "lead" is a contact that has done research, has a problem, has money, is looking for a solution and is ... ready to talk to a sales person.

While marketing automation is a fantastic way to nurture prospects to that point, unless you have an agreement with sales on what constitutes a lead, you're spinning your wheels.

Even with a definition in place, you may find that sales rejects a lead for one reason or another (anything from "they're kicking tires" to "the guy was a jerk"). That's OK ... be sure you have a process to put these 'dead leads' back into your nurturing program. A lot of business is lost by assuming that the sales person's determination that they aren't a prospect was correct (maybe not now, but keep hitting them because you never know).

I hope this is helpful.

Steve

Not sure if I can add to the great comments above but let me put my 2(+) cents worth in from the Sales perspective as well as marketing.

It all comes down to a complete process. What is good about a great marketing campaign without a follow through sales process and feedback to marketing to determine the effectiveness (ROI)? If you have sales buy-in on the marketing campaign and have delivered leads, have you the means to score your leads before you pass them on to your sales team. This will allow them to dig into the "hotter" leads first and hopefully get some quick wins. This will also build your credibility to generate quality leads. I would also generate reports/dashboards to monitor if leads are being followed up on and how many are being converted to opportunities (win/loss). If you are using a CRM, you should be able to track the effectiveness of the campaign.

By involving the sales team with the whole process from beginning to end, they will feel that they take ownership to its success or failure. You will also have analytics on which types of campaigns are worth spending your hard earned marketing dollars on in the future.

It was a huge eye opener to me when I created a marketing campaign the first time in Salesforce.com. Keep in mind, we never tracked anything before we started using SFDC. The sales team had input and helped create a "pre-qualified" list of companies that would be targeted. Once information was sent out, the sales team was responsible for following up. What a shock it was to find out the majority of leads were not followed up! When I asked some of the sales people how things were going, some said they had no time to follow up on leads! No matter how well a campaign is developed and executed, it will go nowhere without the sales team making the effort. A lesson learned: make sure you have sales executive buy-in that will be able to ensure that the team is committed and follows through.

Last food for thought: "According to research from SiriusDecisions, 79 percent of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams. Of the remaining, 70 percent of leads are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons. However, the same data from SiriusDecisions found that 70 percent of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor." No wonder marketing gets frustrated and cannot create accurate metrics on the effectiveness of their campaigns!

The final requirement: Lead nurturing. Definately needed to improve ROI of your campaigns in my opinion.

OK, so more that 2 cents worth but hopefully helpful.

This was a great thread! Thanks to everyone for their input. I learned a lot and have gained many points to ponder.

"After the leads are delivered to the sales team, they die."

Not on my watch.

Any team I've ever managed has had metrics put in place for the management of leads - tracking them; reviewing them; forecasting them; mining ongoing opportunities; reporting lead-to-close ratios - all of this is important to validating the marketing campaign which generated them.

Any sales organization NOT doing this needs new management. Period.

Lead generation is not something marketing should "do to sales", but that is what it increasingly feels like. No amount of tracking, cajoling, bullying or the like will improve the situation. Sales has to be involved from the outset and the activity has to demonstrably support business strategy and get everyone's buy-in. Therein lies another problem. In recent years marketing has become too detached from the business and too concerned with doing stuff which is tactical and which they claim is difficult to measure. The truth is marketing is a process not a black-art, that is there to support the business and make it easier to sell. As marketers we convinced ourselves, and I'm guilty here too, that marketing was fundamentally different from sales. The truth is that sales and marketing form part of a single continuum that runs from business strategy, through messaging, to communications and on to business development. Do any one of those in isolation and the result will be confused customers and frustrated sales people

Catherine,
I'm a bit late with my answer on this one, but I did want to add another aspect to the conversation. I agree wholeheartedly with the conversation about on lead scoring, nurturing, and qualification. At Eloqua, that's our bread and butter, so definitely think of those aspects first and foremost.

But, once you've done that, think of sales enablement as the next goal. Giving sales really deep insight into who the leads are - at the individual, team, and territory level - so they know exactly who to talk to and where to take the conversation.

Here's an eBook on that exact subject - something to digest once your lead management is up and running:

http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2009/08/sales-enablement-key-goal-of-b2b.html