The Lead Management Shopping List

Transcription

1 The Lead Management By Wiebe Mokken, Owner & CEO of MMIT

2 Recently I visited a convention where I was allowed to present MMIT and the different products and services we deliver. During that presentation I made a few bold statements about the level of success MMIT has achieved when implementing our Lead Management solution. Right after the meeting I was approached by a Marketing Manager who asked me: So what makes your application so special? Lead Management has been a pain for so many years now, why do you feel that you can solve the problem? The first thing I thought was: Mental note to self: change presentation, your point has not come across. My reply to her was: The first and most important thing to remember is that having good and efficient Lead Management is not about the application. In most cases a Lead Management application is indeed useful and does play a role in the process, but it is not a panacea; it is just one of the necessary elements of the solution. The application, any Lead Management application, will only work if these five building blocks are in place: 1. Interfaces with the systems that generate the leads. The application needs leads of course, all relevant leads preferably. 2. Data quality. Bad data will get you unhappy sales people. 3. Process control and metrics. You need to know where your leads are and if they are being worked with. 4. Marketing metrics. You have to be able to refine your marketing based on objective results in order to optimize the quality of your leads. 5. Change management. Train your sales staff and turn them into true believers that will fight for their share of the leads. If all of these elements are in place, some of which are built into the application, then you will be successful. Rapid implementation and early feedback on actual sales will also help. By the way, MMIT has only just finished implementing a Lead Management infrastructure just like the one I described for an organization in India with close to 300 retailers in two months time. The Marketing Manager was quiet for some time. I was asking myself if I had been too enthusiastic about a topic so many people dislike, that has happened before I m afraid. Then she said: Here is my card, call me next week, we ll make an appointment. Now it is up to MMIT to manage this lead. You will find more on the five building blocks in the next couple of chapters. MMIT - The Lead Management - november

3 Building Block 1 Leads Lead management systems need leads. Therefore interfacing with other systems is unavoidable. However interfacing has always been considered to be difficult and cumbersome. There are stories galore about systems that got connected and then got stuck, frozen, paralyzed. But that is history. Or should be at least. Building and maintaining proper interfaces in the lead management arena is not a problem today. The problem can be, and has been, solved. Not just by MMIT by the way. New technology has made it a lot easier than it was before. At MMIT we are proud however about the WAY we solved it. The process through which we reach an agreement with the supplier of the data we need is extremely efficient. It requires minimal effort from the lead supplying party and is as safe and secure as can be. Feeds can be single records in (near) real time or files with records selected through, for example, Business Intelligence. We treat the records according to agreed business rules that can be quite complex; records can be scored and prioritized on the basis of their characteristics. An obvious example is that web requests get priority over BI generated leads. The client can of course decide which rules should be used. Our typical clients have between five and ten sources of leads; if there are clear marching orders and our counterparts are collaborative, we build, test, document, deploy and start monitoring these feeds within a matter of weeks. From then on the leads generated through the web site, through trade shows, through direct marketing response, through business intelligence and all those leads that spontaneously raise their hand are safely funnelled into our lead management system. We do not send them through for follow up at once though; first we have a very quick but thorough look at the data. The Marketing Manager I mentioned in the last chapter generated tons of leads through creative campaigns. Nobody within the company, nobody, knew what to do with these leads. Imagine saying: I want to buy! and then, in this day and age, hearing nothing. That hurts. MMIT - The Lead Management - november

4 Building Block 2 Data Quality Imagine a typical sales person: somebody who has chosen the job because he/she wants to interact with people, who can be charming, who creates the right atmosphere, who reads his/her clients and prospects and wants to meet people in the showroom This is often not somebody who will jump at the opportunity when handed a lead sheet with the directive: Call these people, they want a test drive. There are of course the extremely creative and ambitious sales people that fight for whatever lead they can get, but I doubt if they are in the majority. Now imagine this sales person going to the phone with a lead sheet, picking up the mobile or sitting down in front of their monitor, and the following scenario unfolding: - The name of the first lead is Donald Duck. No call needed. - The phone number of the second lead is Yeah, sure. - The third lead picks up the phone and says: I wrote on the form that I would be in market a year from now. Why are you calling me today? and - The fourth lead says: Why are you trying to sell me a car? I bought one from you guys three weeks ago! All this can happen within 5 minutes. But you will have lost the sales person s enthusiasm for Lead Management for a good deal longer. The typical reaction is: The leads you send me suck, I m sticking with who walks into the store. Understandable? What should have happened - A cleansing application takes out silly names, swear words, xxx, test@test.com, etc. - Phone numbers, addresses, etc. are checked for integrity - Being in market should be checked through questions or analysis of behaviour - There should be one central point of reference for customers and prospects (CDI): do not try to sell a product to someone who has just purchased one. Yes, there is RFM but that is for whoever has nothing but a billing system. In B2B there are different rules. It is essential that the leads you send to your sales people are relevant. It is essential that they feel there is true value in these leads, so before you send leads to sales people the contact data should be checked, swear words and silly name records should be removed, purchase history should be consulted and qualification and scoring of leads might also be a good idea. In our experience sales people learn to love leads that actually lead to sales. They prefer the person-to-person sell, but leads that make them hit their targets are very popular as well. In the end they will fight for them. Proper data quality is essential when it comes to making sales people work with real, relevant leads. It makes it easier for them to take the hurdle of calling and avoids giving them the excuse that you are wasting their time. And let s face it: it is doable. The systems and the processes exist. Help your sales teams achieve their targets and at the same time create a zero-excuse environment. Could help your bottom line as well. So, let s say Building Block 1 Integration has happened and Building Block 2 Data Quality is in place as well, how do you know what s happening? Answer coming up in the next chapter. MMIT - The Lead Management - november

5 Building Block 3 Process Control So you have your interfaces in place and you have your data cleansed and standardized. Now have you really? You will now update your central database and then send the lead to the appropriate dealer. Or have you done that already? Then the dealer will open the lead in the application and get in contact with the lead. Will they really? You have asked them to do so, but has it really happened? The point here is that if you do not have a proper view on your data, if you do not have the capability to always know where a specific record is, the process will sooner or later fall over. Monitoring is easier said than done. Exception reporting sounds great, but you do need to know what the exceptions are. Let me give you a few examples of what typically goes wrong: You have a brand website and some microsites that typically are related to a campaign or a product release. You have nice forms in place that capture names and contact details so that your sales people can call your prospects. Now one of the interfaces fails. Leads are still coming into the system, but not all of them. After a couple of days you notice that there seems to be a drop in the number of leads and you investigate. You find and fix the problem. But most of those forgotten leads will have gone cold. People expect to be contacted within a few hours - maximum. This is where proper, smart monitoring will help. This type of monitoring shows what number of leads is expected on the basis of experience and sends out an alarm when numbers drop unexpectedly. A very typical problem is that you have these hot leads generated by your well designed campaign and by spending lots of money with Google or one of their competitors and these hot leads are cleansed and standardized and logged in the database and then sent on to your retail organization who are notified of the arrival of a beautiful opportunity. And then nothing happens. There are hardly any rational reasons for it, but this happens all the time. Nothing is happening all the time. The good news is: it can be fixed. The cure is not simple and I will write more about it in another chapter, but essential is that you can see whether a lead has been followed up or not, that you know whether feedback has been delivered. This way you will know where the process is broken and where you need to go and change behaviour. Knowing where things go wrong today is a prerequisite for repair tomorrow. Curious about the next building block? Marketing metrics, coming up. MMIT - The Lead Management - november

6 Building Block 4 Marketing Metrics Let s recapitulate: You have your lead sources connected to your workflow, your data is being cleansed and standardized, nonsense data is being taken out, you know where your data sits and when leads are being followed up or not. So you should be fine right? Actually you are not there yet. There are still a couple of things to do. use other methods to prequalify your leads. Your sales force will be so grateful and once they notice that following up on the leads they are given actually helps them sell, they will start fighting over them and that is roughly where you want to be. But what if your sales team is not so very eager to follow up on centrally generated leads to start out with? What to do then? We ll tackle that in the next chapter. Imagine that you have an excellently behaving sales force that is not always the case, this is the topic of the next chapter imagine every lead being picked up in time and being followed up diligently. Can things still go wrong? Yes: If your leads are bad. If your marketing campaigns or your web sites create leads with a very low rate of conversion the sales team will become, let me put it mildly: demotivated. Who wants to follow up leads that have a negligible probability to generate a sale? We need to regain the trust of the sales force here, because in the past many companies have said: I have sent these thousand people a letter, now get on the phone and follow up! Very, very demotivating. In short: it is important to know what the conversion rate of your campaign is in order to optimize your marketing efforts; therefore you need marketing metrics. Make sure you get them quickly, daily preferably or even near real time. Work with control groups, work with split runs, get better at putting good leads in front of your sales team, not just any lead just because you can. And if you really, really cannot get your conversion rate over 3-4%, please work with a call center or MMIT - The Lead Management - november

7 Building Block 5 Change Management The Carrot This will be your situation after having done everything right: - You connected the relevant data feeds so the right data is flowing into you systems and leads are getting to your sales people - You have cleansed the data so that the sales people do not get rubbish to work with - You have optimized your marketing spend so that the sales people get the best possible leads in front of them - You know where your data is, when it reaches your sales people and you even know if the leads are being acted upon. And then you see that they are not. Some people say that in some companies, in some societies, in some countries, people are so very disciplined that there is nothing to worry about: the sales team will take care of the leads in a timely fashion in the appropriate way. Well experience shows that usually they don t. I know of only one example of a client s sales force displaying this wonderful behaviour and this is where the sales force is rewarded on sales alone and there is no showroom. It s If you do not sell: no income. Period. But this is a rare situation and should probably be mentioned in the next Building Block: The Stick. In all other settings I have seen there is a spontaneous adoption rate of about 20%-30%. These are sales people that immediately grasp the intentions and the procedures and start working with their new leads and the new Lead Management system from the word go. It is imperative that you immediately start working with the other group. And it is also imperative that you realize that it is normal for human beings to resist change even if the change means a demonstrably profitable and rationally understandable improvement. So first you have to sell it to them keeping the above in mind. Create a no excuse environment. Make the training fun, celebrate progress. 1. Train them in the new Lead Management Process: - Explain what you have done, where the leads are coming from, that you have cleansed them, that you are optimizing your marketing and that you are measuring success. - Explain that customer expectations are changing that they want to be contacted a lot faster than in the past, and - Explain that if they are slow in the end, the client will have purchased the product with the company that came up with the right deal FIRST. 2. Train them in the use of the tool: - Show them how easy it is to work with. (It has to be very easy of course. If not, you have the wrong tool.) - Literally use a stopwatch to show how little time it takes to follow-up on leads and leave feedback. - Show them all the nice reports that you can generate on the basis of what happens during Lead Management. 3. Show them that you can see what they do with their leads (this is honesty, not part of the carrot). 4. Then award prizes for the quickest lead opener (cake, beer, money, a CRM-course, whatever works for you) and do the same for quickest feedback or best feedback. See this as a way to show that you too are committed. 5. Report back to them how much money they as a collective have made by following up on the leads. Show them how conversion rate drops after slow response (as it always does). 6. Develop personal KPI s and KPI s for the team: manage the whole process into the daily life of the team. Following this process will get most companies on their way once it is clear how much of a difference this makes. If the process is properly ingrained and it shows profit it will stay part of the company s life. Some sales people however will still see this as a loss of freedom. They will want to stick to handing out the cigar, to kicking the tire and to talk about great offers and discount only. They will think: This has always worked for me. I am not going to let a machine tell me what to do, even if it is only few minutes a day. Selling is a people skill. They will resist the change in creative ways. How to tackle these problems is the subject of the next and final Building Block. MMIT - The Lead Management - november

8 Building Block 5 Change Management The Stick What was it I said in the last chapter? Some sales people will resist the change in creative ways. And these creative ways are really fun. It takes some detective work, but you have to be tough, you have to show the organization that you are on top of it all and there that it is very, very difficult to beat the system. When our clients started rewarding the opening of leads within two hours we noticed in our reports that some dealers opened all leads at nearly the same time, just in time. And, yes you guessed it, they were of course asking one of the management assistants to go into the system every two hours and just open all the leads. So we called the dealers and told them we had found out and that this was not the general idea and that we had built a standard query to find out who was doing this. Then our clients started rewarding actual follow up and we noticed the same thing: lots of follow-up being given in a very short time period. So we checked the follow up and we saw there was nonsense data in the records. We were on the phone no time and made the culprit aware of the fact that we knew he was trying to beat the system. Next we saw that even though one of the somewhat suspect dealers was having a very nice and polished feedback pattern, one of the leads called us and angrily said that no one had called. This was not what was mentioned on the feedback page. There it said that there had been a conversation and that the prospect was not interested anymore and that the prospect had purchased another brand. When we got the dealer on the phone he asked us: Who do you believe? Me, your trusted dealer, or some lying prospect you do not know? And by the way: your leads suck! This is when we decided to devise a short Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire that we consequently mailed out to all the leads that we had passed through the system and where the flag Contacted and feedback given was on. As expected, all of this dealer s leads assured us that they had never been contacted and no, after asking around, nobody else in the household was either. The stick needs to be there, but in most cases only needs to be shown, not used. One of its most important uses is that it makes dealers and sales people that behave well feel extra good: I will get the prize and I will NOT get the punishments - it basically doubles the perceived reward. Yes, people can be very creative and there will often be resistance to change, but please, please remember that it is only a very small minority that will still, after all the efforts you have made, try to sabotage the process. While you are ironing out these last wrinkles, you are already making lots of money because of the fact that the majority of dealers are doing what they should do: quickly contacting people that are in market who tell you that they want to try or buy your product. MMIT - The Lead Management - november

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