Generating demand and generating buyers are two very different lead experiences for a sales person. Demand generation typically delivers a great conversation that may evolve into something eventually at best and a non-responsive withdrawal at worst. In contrast, buyer generation delivers a lead that is ready to get to business and is just looking for the final details. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get to buyer generation without closed loop marketing and a sales lead management system to feed it.
What is Closed Loop Marketing?
It is certainly one of the latest marketing automation and CRM buzz words. It graces many a glossy sales brochure. But, execution seems to fall short in most cases.
Ideally closed loop marketing connects sales to real-time lead flow and marketing to real-time sales responses. Connecting these two symbiotic groups is critical for marketing to produce buyers, sales to close more deals, and both groups to be accountable to the customer experience.
The process sounds simple enough, but the details often make us stumble.
What is a Lead?
This should always be your first question.
What does your buyer look like? Do customers follow a similar pattern in getting from research to purchase? What are those steps and are they measurable?
These important questions are going to define a lead in your closed loop marketing system–a buyer, ready to hand to sales.
How Do You Qualify Prospects?
Qualifying a prospect into your sales management software is the first step in closing the loop. Sales people are not interested in talking to bad phone numbers, bounced emails, and Mickey Mouse. They want to at least have an opportunity to engage real people. So, the first obvious step in qualifying is to do some basic data verification.
There are numerous third-party data services available to assist in scrubbing basic contact data. These services are excellent for minimizing wasted time and early frustration. In addition, many of these service providers, like TargusInfo or eBureau, can also provide qualification scores.
These types of scoring systems can be powerful for marketing feedback and sales routing–they essentially giving you an immediate indication of a lead’s likelihood to close. As you begin to acquire more sales data you will be able to create increasingly accurate custom scoring and prioritization rules.
Tracking Sales Activities
Lead tracking and capturing accurate sales activities is critical to successful closed loop marketing. The secret is accuracy and minimal data entry. Data should be captured, not entered, whenever possible.
Well defined statuses and sales processes simplifies these two requirements. Discrete statuses defining routine sales actions and time stamped by your lead management software will produce valuable data. Defining consistent sales processes will provide integrity to the trends and patterns you observe in your subsequent analysis.
Feeding Actionable Data Back to Marketing
Now that you are collecting good, real-time data on every leads and every sales action it is time to close the loop with marketing.
If lucky, sales teams may feed marketing bits and pieces of data on a monthly basis. This is simply unacceptable and of minimal value. Your sales team is creating critical data every day. Meanwhile, marketing is optimizing and tuning campaigns daily as well. There is a lot of question as to how helpful 30 day old data will be in this scenario. But, one thing is certain that sales data is critical to marketing in their optimization processes and certainly will produce a better lead for sales.
Here are some examples of sales data you should be feeding back into your marketing campaign(s):
- Contact rates
- Attempt to contact rates
- Withdraws
- Disqualifications
- Bogus
- Applications/Proposals
- Closings
Tuning Your Marketing Campaigns
Use your early action data to build forecasting models for final dispositions. This creates benchmarks that allow you to react and tune your campaigns much quicker. This simple efficiency will have you improving lead quality and saving lots of marketing dollars.
In addition, to focusing on maximizing closings look a non-competitive fall-out in withdraws, disqualifications, and bogus. Are there opportunities to focus my ad, media, or lead buying to better align with my products and product qualifications?
Most importantly–when marketing gets the data be sure to do something with it. Reviewing and taking actions on sales data will produce enormous benefit to your marketing efforts and sales’ confidence in their marketing department or partner.
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Want more information about Kaleidico's lead management software or services visit www.kaleidico.com.
