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Who should own tele-qualification: sales or marketing?
Who should own this? This question is for both insourced (internal lead qual function) and outsourced (tele-marketing etc). Also, I want to know why you feel the way you do. What are the benefits of one side owning this process versus the other? What are the pitfalls? (By the way, I had trouble figuring out whether to put this question in the sales or marketing section ironically enough....)
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7 Answers
Marketing's job is to get people to engage -- but sales should handle the engagement. (My opinion).
Why, because the engagement with the lead is a "selling" transaction and that is what salespeople are trained for.
Secondarily, the flow of the lead is going to be smoother if it's not passed OFF but passed ON. What do I mean? If marketing hires a group of folks to qualify the leads when they are done the pass them OFF to sales -- they drop responsibility for the lead. Thus the lead changes "management" as well.
This means the flow of the lead is broken the objectives of the people and the manager may be close but they are different. If the lead is qualified in sales the qualifier works for the sales management that will be holding them accountable for quality. Quality can be managed at both ends if the lead stays in the sales department from start to finish.
Changing departments opens up more possibilities for finger pointing. If the lead is the responsibility of sales the top sales dog will take the heat for whatever happens to the lead -- full responsibility forces the top manage to make sure the WHOLE process works together -- this is much more difficult when you have two groups and two managers working different parts of the cycle.
We could also say how does marketing train it's sales guys? I guess some would argue that lead gen isn't selling but I would totally disagree and the best place for the sales guys is in the sales department.
Anyway, in my opinion you never have two different departments work the lead. Sales has responsibility for the results of the leads this makes them the best people to decide if they are leads in the first place.
Why are baton races so difficult -- because you have to pass the baton -- why add the pass to an already difficult situation -- where is the up side?
There is no upside to marketing qualifying the lead, at least none that I can think of, can you? That would be the only justification for having marketing do the lead gen -- if there were an identifiable up side.
Great question Craig:
My take: If Marketing and Sales are aligned on how telequal is to be measured, and there's an enduring commitment to transparency about the results, then it shouldn't matter who owns it. Some separation of powers should be put in place to ensure that all of the uncomfortable conversations take place. i.e., if Marketing funds telequal but Sales manages it, then they theoretically should be talking to each other more than if one group "owns" the whole function. But any ownership structure in the absence of agreed and consistent measurement is doomed.
Tom
I agree with Tom. The silos of sales and marketing are disappearing so the old issues of not being on the same page with the same objectives are fading away. But, I will give you the answer we give our clients...
Give it to the organization that has the passion, experience and bandwidth to run it. Those are the three criteria that truly tell the tale when it comes to success!
Just to add a data point, our 2009 Lead Generation Metrics and Compensation study shows that 68% of leadgen groups now report to Sales. It will be interesting to see if that trend continues in the 2010 study - will keep you posted.
Hi Craig,
I agree with Trish regarding giving teleprospecting to the organization that has the passion, experience, and bandwidth to run it.
Additionally, I see it as needing attention from both. I think of it like a parent-child relationship. Typically, the mother of teleprospecting would be Marketing, because much like a mother and her child, the mother's concerned with making sure her child is fed so that he or she grows up healthy. So it should go with Marketing and teleprospecting. Marketing should be providing teleprospecting with the names, lists, etc. it needs to find fully qualified sales opportunities.
The father in this relationship, is Sales. Traditionally, right, father's are the disciplinarians (remember, I'm speaking traditionally for the sake of the analogy). Sales needs to let teleprospecting know where they're going wrong in terms of closing the loop on opportunities passed. Why was a lead passed over if, when the scheduled call happened, none of the business pains that were initially reported were factual? Sales should also own the responsibility of letting teleprospecting know when things went right, too.
Good question!
Craig - good post. as you can imagine, I have had this conversation several time in my career -- now that I have taken the time (over the last 4 years) to get to the crux of the issue, it's actually "none of the above". What marketers often forget is that the efficacy of a campaign (lead gen/telemarketing) is 100% tied to the quality of the data. If you have the right person at the right target company for all your prospects then marketing does the campaigning and sales does the calling and THE problem of telemarketing goes away. Most companies use telemarketing because they are operating off of sewage data and use humans to "clean it" - if you look at those economics (usually hidden in headcount costs) they are egregious. Then you can use teh headcount efficiently ALWAYS calling on the right person. As you know, I was so appalled at these wasted dollars (due to crap/garbage data/lists), I started a company 4 years ago (Reachforce) to fix this data quality issue from the start.
Just another datapoint: Quite often sales wants to be heavily involved in the process, but have marketing manage the programs day to day. Most of my clients for teleprospecting are in sales. Most of my clients for online lead development are in marketing.
Craig
I believe that lead generation is a holistic process it is more than its individual elements of marketing campaigns , good lists / quality database, lead scoring, nurturing , tele-qualification, lead routing and closed loop management. It is all of those elements integrated together coupled with a good management process. Looking at lead gen just as independent campaigns or telequalification elements will not give you the closed loop results of an integrated system and process.
With experience of having tele-qualification reporting to both marketing and sales, I would recommend it be a marketing responsibility..
In the 8 years I ran the Avaya eDemand lead program, lead quality as our number one priority I see tele-qualification as a key element of the whole lead generation process. we viewed sales is marketing’s customer.
The actual integrated process of generating quality leads includes campaigns to generate inquiries, managing the database, scoring the leads, building the nurturing campaigns, doing the tele-qualification and routing are all as part of the marketing process. I see tele-qualification as a key element of the whole lead generation process
Tele-prospecting productivity and quality are directly impacted by the quality of the warm inquiries generated by marketing. Warm marketing inquiries had a much higher lead conversion rate ( 1.5 to 8X higher) than cold calling from traditional list sources. Tele-qualification was also one of the most expensive elements of the lead generation process and was funded as part of the whole lead generation budget
Of the integrated marketing lead generation process, tele-qualification was the final lead quality step. Communications between sales and marketing is critical, we had good feedback communication between sales and the Tele-qualification team regarding lead quality. .
Sales priorities are clearly making the numbers and hitting quotas, generally they do not have the resources, focus or marketing skills to do the lead generation function.
At Avaya we delivered leads that were 70-80% qualified as judged by sales (MQL to SQL conversion rate). We traced 85% of direct and indirect leads in our closed loop SFA system. To accomplish this we held sales accountable with high reporting visibility, we stacked ranked the lead management performance from the field sales rep up through the sales manager and Regional VP on a weekly basis ( Direct sales and indirect sales).
1. Sales movement of the leads into active or unqualified status,
2. Sales assignment of the pipeline revenue value of the lead
From the integrated process we had quality metrics that provided KPIs on pipeline value, conversion rates and cost per lead of the various marketing lead gen sources.
Summary; Marketing is responsible for providing quality leads that sales can work and win. Sales’ is responsible for providing quality feedback on the status of the leads back to marketing.
Dennis Head
www.edemandleads.com
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