CRM - March 2009 - (Page 38)

Looking to Marketing gathers the leads; sales pursues them. It sounds simple. It isn’t | By Marshall Lager SCORE There’s a timeworn argument between the marketing department and the sales department. Marketing complains that the sales team isn’t following up the bushels of leads it gathers. Sales complains that most of marketing’s leads are of such poor quality they aren’t worth the effort of pursuit. It’s like an endless tennis match where blame is the ball. Meanwhile, opportunities are being lost and revenue is stagnant—at best. It’s the fundamental reason for lead scoring: arriving at a set of qualifications that measure the strength and value of a lead. Directing business from the wide end of the sales funnel to the narrow end is all about having one’s corporate priorities straight, but those priorities change from industry to industry, and from company to company. This is a story about what goes into getting leads qualified, codified, and ranked so that the juiciest opportunities are always the first to get pounced upon, as seen by four industry experts. IT’S A MATTER OF (BUSINESS) INTELLIGENCE “There’s huge focus on analyzing the customer base in a real-time manner,” says Kevin Bandy, partner at global consultancy Accenture. “Many companies have invested in Web analytics and business intelligence, but they must use it to identify new routes to market. If you’re not linking BI to [specific] customer data, you don’t know which customers fit into which analytical cohort.” Not only is marketing responsible to the company as a whole, its first “customer” is the sales department, and its value to sales is measured in actionable leads. “There’s an enormous amount of expenditure on MROI—marketing return on investment—and it’s growing every year because the customer base is growing,” Bandy says. “If analytics aren’t tied to customer data, there’s no means of proving MROI.” While this may sound like a marketing or broad strategic play, it has equal value in the sales trenches. Sales must understand what’s coming in from marketing, and have the ability to continue the analysis so that leads aren’t static and dead. So what makes a lead good? This is the central question that lead-scoring applications try to help businesses answer. Unfortunately, the answer is usually, “It depends.” That’s not a matter of snark—a lead that’s good in one industry segment, or for one company, or at one time of year, may be rubbish elsewhere. “There is no single definition of a ‘good lead,’” says Mike Vannoy, a partner with SalesEngine International, a maker of B2B lead-scoring applications. “We make fun of that idea around 38 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | MARCH 2009 www.destinationCRM.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - March 2009

CRM - March 2009 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Stay Tuned Stimulating Citizen Experience CRM on Twitter Retailers Face Reality Making Relationships Matter Required Reading We the People Innovation Nation CRM and the iPhone Looking to Score The Virtual Welcome Mat A Tough Transition Made Easier A Training Regimen Gets Rigorous A Battle Fought from Afar Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - March 2009

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