Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

“Nearly 63 percent of small-business marketers say they can’t track the return on investment of their marketing programs and point to poor feedback from sales regarding the status of leads as a prime culprit, according to a new study by the Sales Lead Management Association,” reports Christopher Hosford, senior reporter BtoB magazine.

The study also notes that marketers are also to blame with 56 percent of respondents stating they do not qualify their leads before sending them to sales; And you wonder why sales doesn’t trust marketing’s judgment?

We have always purported that determining who is real and where they are in the buying process is essential in determining whether or not a prospect is ready for interaction from your sales team. Our recent webinar hosted by Andrew Gaffney, Editor of the DemandGen report, “Real Revenue Gains with Marketing Automation” showed how this plays out in the real world with real companies:

• 2-4x higher Lead Conversion Rates for companies using lead scoring

• 181% higher average close rates from the use of Marketing Automation systems

• Bid-Win ratios 150% higher for organizations that deliver real-time lead alerts to sales

• Sales teams with database filtering tools reported 200% higher average revenue growth in 2008

Automation has helped B2B and B2C companies alike automatically qualify potential leads by scoring each individual prospect based on their engagement with your company, demographic profile and timing. With multiple scoring techniques to choose from, marketing/sales teams can fully understand how each prospect moved to the front of the line. Custom scores based on virtually any single or compound criteria also proved valuable in identifying unique buying behaviors.

And while Marketing Automation vendors , including eTrigue, continue to promote the importance of aligned marketing and sales teams. According to the study, “too many of these types of organizations operate within isolated silos and have not found a way to align the objectives of sales and marketing.”

Please visit the following link to read Hosford’s article:

Study: Small companies can’t track campaign ROI, fail to qualify leads

I received a call from a somewhat flustered friend the other day. He is with a well-run start-up that has a working product and is showing good revenue growth—All is well in the world, or should be. Unfortunately he just ended his monthly board meeting on a sour note.

After launching a very successful demand generation program that’s generating more qualified leads than Sales can address, this board meeting should have been an easy one. The program was organized and aligned with the sales department—everyone was happy, even the CEO.

In the presentation’s home stretch, after he showed qualified lead growth, a reduction in the cost per lead, and enthusiastic comments from the VP of Sales, one simple question took the wind out of his sails. “Why aren’t you marketing to your Served Available Market?” He said he took a step back, felt flushed, and knew that it was a good question that he didn’t have an answer to. “I was so focused on the success of our newly launched demand generation initiative that I didn’t even think to go back and consider if the 70K leads I have in my marketing database actually covered my market.”

Several board members chimed in on the opportunity to provide a quick tutorial. “It was more than painful; it was downright embarrassing.” And rather than just give instructions to go off and figure out his SAM, list acquisition strategy, etc., they all joined in with a chalk-talk. As it turns out, his total available market is roughly 300K businesses, which serve about one fourth of the market, or 75K businesses―not far off from the 70K leads in his database. This would be fine except marketing databases aren’t even close to 100% on target, and his sale is moderately complex—typically with three decision makers at each company. If you add to the mix that B2B databases are continually in flux with 25% of contacts changing companies, functions, emails, every year, what started out as an enthusiastic board update ground down into one simple question: “Given the effectiveness of your program, why on earth are you targeting only a small part of your market?”

Are you marketing to your SAM?

More often than not, it seems discussions with sales executives eventually lead to the subject of sales team productivity—and, of course, how to improve it. And while it’s a very broad subject ranging from automation to motivation, what‘s surprising is how little attention is given to understanding how much time each salesperson actually devotes to selling!

A recent survey showed that the amount of time the average sales rep spends selling is just over 35%—a 12% drop from two years ago. You would think that with the adoption of sales-force automation solutions, web meetings, etc. that things would be getting better, not worse.

I was intrigued. And while unscientific, with a few calls it wasn’t hard to come up with the top-of-mind activities that are taking sales reps away from revenue-generating activities:

• Travel/Meetings: Of course, these are necessary parts of the sales process, so you may not want to consider them “non-revenue generating,” however, if not managed, they can be a great source of inefficiency. I have had more than one sales rep ping-pong around Asia because they failed to schedule meetings far enough in advance to build a logical and time-efficient travel schedule. And while web-based presentations won’t replace a face-to-face meetings, it’s often easier to get a group together on-line than in the same room.
• Administrative and Support: By far the biggest complaint was following up on often unnecessary administrative activities or supporting a customer because they can’t get through to technical support. While these two issues aren’t sales related, a customer’s best leverage is with the sales rep when he can’t get the help he or she needs. And though the solution is obvious, it’s surprising that companies don’t see the true cost of cutting back on administrative and support services.
• 1:1 Marketing: I was surprised to hear how many sales reps felt as if they had to do their own 1:1 marketing emails to build relationships. Coming from a company that markets Demand Generation software, this was music to my ears. Companies using software and services to help each salesperson email any volume of prospecting or nurturing messages is not only inefficient, but potentially counterproductive! Inconsistent messaging, poor timing, and conflicts with marketing efforts are just a few of the pitfalls. Again, not a hard problem to solve—just automate the marketing department with an effective demand generation program, and let the sales team do what they do best—sell!

As your company tries to continually improve efficiencies in other parts of your organization, you too may want to take a closer look at how much of the time your sales teams spend actually selling!