Guide to Killer Lead Management for Account-Based Selling

Transcription

1 Guide to Killer Lead Management for Account-Based Selling

2 Guide to Killer Lead Management For Account-Based Selling Everyone Loses When Your Best Opportunities Don t Reach the Right Sales Reps You ve been going the extra mile to make sure your sales team is prepared to be successful: carefully evaluating the latest technology; setting up the proper qualifying process and ideal candidate profile; making sure the sales team has every pipeline meeting on their calendar; and implementing Salesforce.com to make sure every sales rep and sales manager is working off the same information and workflow. Yet, you re still struggling with challenges mapping Salesforce.com processes to your account-based selling strategy. Your company has introduced marketing automation software to bring in more leads, the Salesforce.com record count is continuously growing, and your products are getting increasingly more complicated as your sales team grows with your account base. This paper will address commonly overlooked issues that obstruct successful account-based selling (ABS) and how to fix them. Preparing Your Team to Win With Account-Based Selling According to a study by MillerPierce, only 50% of the leads marketing hands off to sales are followed up on. Your sales team is missing out on closing dozens of great deals because they re not aware of them. The success of a good sales team is built on a foundation of good data. Salesforce.com is useless if the right people don t have access to the right leads and contacts at the right time. Your sales team needs high visibility into inbound leads to quickly follow up and qualify them. In sales, every minute counts. Don t lose your window of opportunity by wasting time routing leads by territory when they should be going directly to the rep assigned to that account. If one of your reps gets the wrong lead, how likely will they reassign that lead to the right rep? You need to tag your targeted accounts in Salesforce.com in the account view and assign the right reps to those accounts so they can quickly view incoming leads that matter to the accounts they manage. According to a study done by MIT and InsideSales.com, you are 21x more likely to qualify a lead if you contact them within the first 5 minutes of them filling in your lead form than if you waited 30 minutes. Additionally, every call you make to that lead after 20 hours actually harms your ability to qualify the lead. Unfortunately, most sales reps are too busy focusing on managing Salesforce opportunities, connecting with clients, and scheduling and planning meetings, so they don t regularly check for new lead assignments, and many follow up windows are lost. In order to prepare your sales team to win, you need to set up the correct workflow to process, route and track your inbound leads efficiently. By matching leads to accounts, 25-50% of your inbound leads will match to existing accounts. Aggregating your leads by accounts lets you see larger business opportunities you d normally overlook. For example, on an individual basis five separate low interest leads might not look like much, but when you can see that they re all from the same account, you d realize that account is much hotter than you thought. 2

3 Confronting Territory Management Issues With Account Based Selling There are so many ways territory management can go wrong: failing to completely map your territories or assigning reps to cover all those territories means hot new leads will fall into an abyss never to be seen again. Relying on territory routing rules is arbitrary and outdated, and often prevents your best reps from getting the accounts they re most capable of closing. This is especially true when selling to large companies with multiple branches in different territories. If you already have a rep working on a Cisco account in San Jose and a new lead comes in from Cisco in New York, that lead would be geo routed to the rep who covers the New York territory, although the rep who already owns the Cisco account would be best fitted to handle it. Territory routing can also be a problem when your sales development team is doing mass outreach to a large audience. Oftentimes when doing outreach, those interested in your offer will only visit your website and fill out a lead form instead of directly responding to your sales team. The best person to respond to those inbound leads would be the salesperson who sent those s and knows those accounts, but if you re not doing account-based routing, the lead will go to another rep less familiar with that account. While routing leads by territory may be easier to set up initially, it s actually much harder to maintain than routing by account owner. Territory routing relies on having perfect firmographic data, which at best is 50% accurate, since it comes from self-reporting or 3rd party enrichment sources, so many leads don t match any of your selected criteria. These unmatched leads have to be routed to marketing or sales ops for manual assignment, which kills your golden window of opportunity for follow up. Failing to follow up on inbound leads means you re losing sales and wasting valuable leads. Image 1: Territory-Based Routing vs. Account-Based Routing 3

4 Action Steps to quickly get the right leads to the best rep with Account-Based Sales: Step #1: Create named accounts aligned to your salespeople s abilities and backgrounds will improve your close rate by playing to their strengths. Just as you ve worked hard to correctly align your hunters (AEs who excel with opening new accounts and navigating enterprise decision makers) and farmers (account managers whothrive with upsell & cross-sell opportunities), you want your top reps aligned with your top accounts. Step #2: Tag your targeted accounts in Salesforce.com in the account view (object) to make it easier for your reps to promptly see the inbound leads that match their targeted accounts to ensure fast follow up. (Be sure to assign reps to each of these accounts too!) Step #3: If an incoming lead matches an existing assigned account, give leads directly to the assigned account manager, so you don t need to spend time having inside sales qualify. How to Use Accounts to Enrich Leads Maintaining Salesforce.com data is a cumbersome and often a big headache. If you let your leads stagnate in the catacombs of the Salesforce database, you ll miss out on selling to new accounts and upselling to existing accounts. There are multiple reasons for needing to enrich leads. For example: 1. Shortened web forms: Marketers have often reduced the number of captured fields on web campaign forms to speed up and ease the net new lead registration process. Yet, with the shortened form, you don t have enough info to properly identify and route leads. 2. Inferred location data is inaccurate or missing: Marketers can t solely rely on their marketing automation platform to identify a lead s location by IP address is X. 3. List uploads: Purchased or other imported lists often have incomplete or inconsistent fields. Traditionally, appending records have been the solution for finding invisible leads in your database, but data enrichment can get expensive. However, if you have multiple leads from the same company you re paying excessively to append the same firmographic data multiple times. Paying for these services from companies will cost you $0.20 to $0.75 per phone verified record on average, and they use low quality outsourced call centers to verify and append your data. More premium services charge as much as $25 per contact with phone verification. Don t overcomplicate your Salesforce data issues by using a solution that doesn t solve your core problem. Action Steps to reduce your costs to enrich leads: Step #1: In Salesforce.com, make sure you ve added all of your named accounts and they include an account owner. If the account is missing data, then do a one-time enrichment at the account level. Step #2: You can use the information in your accounts to standardize your lead and contact firmographic data without spending time and money on unnecessary data enrichment. This will help you keep your TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) low since you won t have to pay for services to append your missing firmographic fields. 4

5 Why It s Imperative to Address Duplicate Records Your team puts so much work into Salesforce.com, but duplicate records can render any CRM implementation useless. Because salespeople generally hate data entry and maintenance is time consuming, they tend to do it quickly, neglect to fill in records completely, and inconsistently enter key fields, such as putting a state abbreviations TX in some company addresses and Texas in others. However, inconsistent data entry makes it impossible for you to query the information you need, which slows your reps down and makes them miss out on great leads. As an example, you search for John Smith at Qualcomm and 3 different results come up; each one at a different stage. How do you know which one is the correct? Duplicates, particularly in named accounts, are a huge time waster for your sales reps. The merge function should alleviate many of these issues, but it s not that simple. Firstly, you ve got to identify the duplicates, then decide on which fields to merge, which requires that you know the current contact details for your prospeect or customer. Regardless, the commitment for better data quality is imperative. If you lack discipline, you will continue to run into barriers. 5 Image 2: The tedious steps involved in looking for and merging duplicates

6 Here are key problems caused by duplicates: 1. Poor customer experience: Your reps call existing customers, who have to inform the reps that they re already customers. 2. Rep productivity: One rep is already engaging with a prospect; another rep sees a new lead from the same prospect and contacts them, unaware they re already being taken care of. This derails the deal. 3. Lack of trust in your marketing communications and promotions: Marketing sets up a campaign for your existing leads, but you have the same person in your pipeline at different stages, so marketing spams the prospect you ve already been engaging with. 4. Derailing reporting and metrics: If you re only measuring the absolute number of leads, your result count is off because you have duplicates and incomplete records. Of course you want to keep your data clean, but manually finding and removing duplicates is always a daunting task. Don t keep wasting time and resources on merging records one at a time when you could be putting in procedures to keep it continuously clean in the first place. With LeanData, we ve increased our Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) conversion rates by over 100% without increasing our marketing program spend. Ben Coffee, Marketing, DataSift After using LeanData s Lead2Account View and Router, DataSift was able to increase their conversion rate from 10% to 25%. With Lead2Account, their reps could instantly see which leads match to existing accounts without having to spend time on Salesforce.com searches. LeanData s account-based routing matches all incoming leads against target accounts so the right rep will get all the leads on their targeted accounts. Not only are their reps far less likely to miss inbound leads, but they can concentrate their efforts on revenue generating activities. With target account leads being routed directly to the right account owner, Datasift s reps were able to act quicker on leads and shorten their sales cycle, increasing revenue. Now 90% of suspects DataSift creates become an opportunity after 45 days. Your next move We get it. You ve got a hefty plate of activities to work on already, but here s a few wrap-up tips to get your team on-board with your account-based selling strategy: 1. Named accounts or territories. Do you have the right mix of account owners for your targets? How is this being maintained? Is it properly denoted in the account details and tagged so you can report on target accounts? 2. Workflow rules. Are these in good shape? How are they being maintained? 3. MQL to SQL rates. Be sure to benchmark and assess conversion ratios monthly and quarterly. 4. Data cleansing. Nothing makes it more difficult to nurture or follow up on when data is dirty. Be sure you ve got a plan to handle duplicates and everyone is aware. One-time cleansing is good. Continuous data quality is better LeanData, Inc. All Rights Reserved. LeanData Inc. 111 West Evelyn Ave. Suite 106 Sunnyvale, CA LEAN (5326) 6