Where do the balls get dropped most often with inbound leads/demand generation?

If there is no process, leads WILL get dropped.

Carlos, Kevin, and Joe are all proponents of thoughtful lead management process with supported metrics, automation, and enforcement. I can't agree more. I have seen machines and I have seen epic fails over the years. Side note -- if you want a machine, ask Focus expert Michael Brenner about the machine at SAP--it's impressive.

It is important to note that you can still minimize leakage with some very simple processes. You can build more infrastructure on top of this set-up as you scale:

1. A CRM system -- Please, for god's sake use one of these.
2. A dedicated follow-up team -- this should be a phone based team whose job it is to follow-up on leads
3. A unified lead definition of what gets passed to sales -- if you don't do this, everything will break (trust me on this)
4. An SLA from sales on what they will do when they receive a qualified lead --
5. A recycle process -- ie the ability to send leads back to marketing (without punishment).

This can be done with just people, collaboration, and some management. You can scale with marketing automation, nurturing processes, etc after that.

Without solid lead management processes in place and enforcement of those processes, normal events and disruptions affecting marketing and sales staff (termination, promotion, etc.) can wreak havoc on leads. For instance, if a qualified lead is submitted to a sales rep who subsequently resigns, that lead may sit for a while before it is transferred to another rep, who may not appreciate its value and puts it at the bottom of their call list.

The failure to have an audit trail of lead nurturing or the reluctance of a rep to record interactions with a lead tend to lessen the value of a lead because someone else may not have the institutional knowledge of the relationship, so the lead is ignored.

Once again, the ball gets often dropped at the sales rep level, when they are not held accountable for each and every lead that they are given.

Unfortunately, in the enterprise, a lot of inbound leads get lost when the customer starts making product requests or asking about exceptions. Sales may approach engineering and engineering already has a product path in mind. Hence, instant tension. Often, especially in startups, sales wants to do whatever it takes to close the sale and feels a right to indicate to engineering a change in the product development path. Larger customers are seen as valuable enough to be flexible for in the mind of the sales team, but not always in the mind of engineering. The best answer lies somewhere in between for most companies.

It's a constant battle - engineering wants sales to sell what they have; sales wants to upsell what the customer wants.

Joe are Carlos are right on. If there is not a measurable, repeatable, documented, lead management process, implemented in your CRM (and optionally MA system), with training for sales and marketing, then the balls will be dropped in the swirly mist between marketing lead generation and sales follow up.

Once the process is in place, folks are trained, and assuming you made good technology choices and changes, then the ball gets dropped by people. Lazy, careless, overzealous, inexperienced, it will happen. But if you have a measurable, repeatable process, you can detect and re-mediate - catch the dropped balls before they hit the ground.
-Kevin

I agree with Craig and Kevin. It takes a decent CRM (with training) and a manager who will not only enforce the use of the CRM and all it's features, but also follow up on inactive leads by monitoring the CRM on a very regular basis.

There are several things that can go wrong, but the most common is lack of a smooth lead transition between marketing and sales.

- Leads are not followed up with at all
- Leads are followed up with, but not right away
- Leads are followed up with a generic response which fails to hook the prospect

Besides having technology to track leads and track sales development rep’s work, the most robust way to close this gap is to have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between marketing and sales. An SLA holds sales and marketing mutually accountable, and describes things like: the minimum required quality for a lead, and how quickly a lead will be followed up with.

Andrew Spoeth
Sr. Manager, Marketing Programs at Marketo
@andrewspoeth

Hand-offs are where leads go to die. Marketing to sales is an easy mark, but there are many others. How about hand-offs between reps when territories change or even between a manager who reassigns a lead to a rep on his team.

High volumes are also a problem. They provide a plausible excuse to be less than rigorous in follow-up.

Documented processes and enforcement rules (trust, but verify) go a long way to help things out. But the nature of individuals is to hoard. Wherever possible create lead assignment rules where the first owner is the final owner. And if owners can't keep up with the volume, the focus needs to be on management to refine the processes.

This is a confused question. Inbound leads are quite different from demand generation.

You may find it helps to get things clear in your mind if you read at my answer here:
http://www.focus.com/questions/marketing/what-is-the-difference-between-lead-...

My simple view is that balls get dropped most often because people waste time on leads which are unlikely to convert to sales for that organisation.

If you know that your product sells to companies between 5 and 50m turnover in technology sectors and you need the CIO, CEO and CFO involved to make a sale, then what are you doing nurturing leads from enterprise corporations in healthcare and talking to a Head of Pathology? Yet that is just one I found last week.

Use a customer intelligence solution to match incoming leads with the types of prospect you know you have a winning proposition for and prioritise those. And make sure you are nurturing all of the key people, not just the one who filled out a form for a download.