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What are the key elements for a lead nurturing function with an inside sales organization?
Many inside sales organizations seem primarily focused on traditional objectives: banging for appointments, qualifying opportunities, inviting people to events or to view sent content, or "waterboarding to BANT." How are inside sales organizations managing a lead nurturing role, and balancing this effort with other requirements?
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6 Answers
There are a couple ways to think about Inside Sales in the lead nurturing process. The most important factor everyone must know is that you cannot downplay the critical function that inside sales plays in the lead management process. So when you ask for specific elements that inside sales provides in the lead nurturing process, the lead qualification function is the most important thing. It just is. The inside lead qualification function is the last mile of lead nurturing. They ensure that all your lead nurturing efforts are a fit for sales and queue them up so sales is more likely to follow up on them. Your lead management plan will not reach it's full potential if the plan is to use automation to nurture, score leads, and then flip them to quota-carrying reps. Inside sales, the age-old lead qualification function, is still the bridge between marketing efforts and sales.
Other things to think about:
1. Phone is another lead nurturing channel -- Every lead nurturing plan should maximize their available channels to score, deliver content, and cultivate prospects. The phone is one of the most tried and true formats to do just that. I will walk through each one below.
2. Scoring by phone -- Jeopardy Answer: The team in the entire marketing-sales process who has(for years) gathered the richest data on a prospect. Jeopardy Question: Who is Inside Sales? The Inside Sales team has been one of the best "scorers" for years. Marketing automation is designed to score people without talking to them. Inside Sales talks to them and gathers real data: they can confirm demographic data (role, etc) and more importantly, gather psycho-graphic data (where are they in the process, what keeps them awake at night, etc). Once someone has talked to inside sales, they are more likely to end up in the correct nurturing flow.
3. Content Delivery -- Want to deliver that prospect relevant content? Ask them the right questions and get real answers. Inside Sales remains the best way to figure out what content a prospect should receive. Marketing should arm them with a matrix to deliver content based on what they hear over the phone. Make sure everything is tracked and captured.
4. Lead Cultivation -- I see the phone used in 2 ways depending on the market:
If you are in highly transactional market, ie a market with broad demographic parameters and lots of buying activity -- you should leverage automated nurturing to get leads to the point of being called and qualified by an inside sales rep.
If you are in a targeted market, e.g. you are marketing to the top 20 Tier 1 manufacturers -- Phone should be introduced early in the process as another channel to reach out to prospects.
There are some key factors that increase success:
1. Inside Sales is not treated as a dialing after-thought, instead they are included as part of the entire revenue generation process
2. Data capture and management is organized and managed.
I hope this helps.
The organizations that do this best partner with their marketing departments to do the bulk of the lead nurturing. Sales organizations should stay as focused as possible on qualified and ready-to-buy prospects. If the prospect is qualified but not yet in an active buying mode, it should be marketing's role to further qualify or accelerate the prospect to an active buying/evaluation phase.
I think the biggest opportunity and challenge for inside sales organizations right now is to figure out how to automate more of the lead nurturing activity, and drive more sales & revenue directly. To that effect, if inside sales groups start measuring their impact less on appointments and more on closed business (or at minimum activities that directly lead to closed deals), their value and role within the organization will only increase in importance and contribution.
Thanks Matt, I get the theory, I'm looking for specific ideas and practices that help inside sales people execute on the principle.
Recent article: ANALYSIS: Telemarketing turns up the volume
http://www.b2bm.biz/knowledgebank/Telemarketing/features/?articleId=39566&utm...
Telemarketing remains an increasingly important part of the marketing mix, according to a new survey conducted by B2B Marketing, in association with The Telemarketing Company.
Funnel fever
The most popular objective for telemarketing, according to the research, is 'generating new leads', selected by 76 per cent of respondents, followed closely by 'booking sales appointments', selected by 72 per cent. 'Lead qualification' was third most popular, cited by 67 per cent. These findings confirm that the primary role of telemarketing is in the so-called demand generation arena.
This was strongly reiterated by the response to the next question, which focused on budget allocation for telemarketing objectives, with 'lead generation' the most popular objective for almost half respondents, and 'booking sales appointments' most popular for a quarter.
No nurturing mentioned. I don't think it's typically considered part of "lead gen"?
Thanks Craig, the specificity is very helpful. Lead management definitely needs more than marketing automation. Lead nurturing vs. lead gen and qualifying still seems a missed nuance for many inside sales teams we see. Too much pressure for immediate results.
My Feb 1 blog post will reference and reflect on your comments: http://salesvpi.avitage.com/salesvpi/2011/02/lead-nurturing-and-the-inside-sa...
Jim
Matt and Craig both make some great points. On the one hand, I agree with Matt that sales should be focused on bringing in the deals that are ready to close. This is tradionally what they have been compensated for. However, I also see the wisdom in what Craig is saying about the value of engagement with the customer that inside sales necessarily has because they are on the phone with them regularly. That's priceless.
On thing's clear - the roles of marketing and sales are changing and organizations are becoming less and less tolerant of fingerpointing when projections don't match actuals. Better analytics around what's really impacting revenue attainment and sustainable growth are driving unprecedented cooperative efforts between these two departments. I suspect successful organizations will employ some sort of hybrid that leverages the best both have to offer. Hopefully this trend will result in greater profitability for businesses and customer's experiencing more "getting heard" by their suppliers.
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