Gain Control with Cultivation

If you are acquiring leads for a sales force, the most critical element you can pay attention to is lead cultivation. It’s more important than qualification. It’s more important than scoring. It’s where all the money is, and if you ignore it, it’s the reason why the sales force won’t respect you.

First, let’s talk a bit about what cultivation means.

Let’s say you are acquiring leads so that your company can sell widgets. You’re a smart direct marketer. You know most people just want to know if your company might have a solution for their challenge(s), so you build a nice solution-based mailer. You don’t focus much on product because Widgets has a nine-month sales cycle—that means 90% of your respondents don’t care about your product yet, they just want to know there is a solution.

You get a great response—you mailed 100,000 pieces and you got 5% response. Whoopee. 5,000 leads—sales will be so pleased with you. Your Web response site and your BRC gathers qualifying information. You send the leads off to the sales force, and you get 50 evil emails telling you how much the leads stink. “These are all just tire-kickers.”

Next time you decide to score and tightly filter the leads. You apply typical BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timing) lead parameters—prospect interest, established budget, opportunity size, time frame to purchase, decision-maker status. You build a scoring matrix—hot, warm, cold—ABCD—or whatever your grading system is. You find that 90% of your leads are cold. 10% of your 5,000 leads go to the sales force and the rest fall to the bottom of their sales force automation database, never to be seen again.

You send 500 leads to the sales force and get 50 vindictive emails screaming that “We were already talking to all these people” and they don’t have enough leads. Does any of this sound familiar?

Here’s the real problem. While 90% of the people who raise their hands may not be ready to buy within the engagement window of an effective sales force (a lousy one will work any leads you give them, but they’ll never make quota), they ARE real prospects. In the midst of the barrage of advertising they are subjected to, your message resonated with their pain and they responded. They need your solution—they just are not ready yet. They are not yet cultivated into a sales lead.

Time and again, when we survey cold leads a year after acquisition, we find 80 to 90% of those leads have bought a solution for the pain that made them respond. But, probably not your solution—unless you find a way to stay in front of them, feed them valuable information and advice, set the playing field, and deliver them to the sales force when they are ready to purchase.

Our eProfiler technology produces personalized, interactive email newsletters. If your average sale warrants it, you can accomplish the same thing with more expensive approaches such as telemarketing, paper newsletters, and frequent seminars or training offerings. Any touch that delivers relevant information will work. Emphasis on relevancy—people won’t stay engaged if they don’t get GREAT value from your communications.

If you are already cultivating leads, congratulations. You should still examine the relevance component and how it connects to your overarching strategy for how you will re-score these leads as they mature from cold to hot. The key to high return on cultivation is how well you do this—and this is where our expertise and experience really helps. The biggest difference cultivation makes is the trend for qualified, sales-ready leads. As long as you keep cultivating prospects into leads, all your acquisition campaigns are additive. The cultivation base continues to climb, the cost per lead declines rapidly, and the number of leads you can deliver to the sales force each month continues to climb. You’ll find that these are the best leads you’ve ever had—in most cases, you are demonstrably in touch before the sales force is, the prospect understands why your solution is superior, you always make the short list, and you’ve created a minefield of expectations that your competition must traverse.

Any acquisition process that captures name, email address, and a little profiling information can effectively feed the machine. And, it flies under the radar screen—your competition will hardly know what hit them.

Cultivation Success

One of our most important discoveries in the last ten years is that, with a cultivation process in place, the only real difference between cold leads and hot leads is time. We discovered this by accident when we surveyed leads generated the previous year for InFocus. We discovered that the number of people who had bought a solution—in this case, a data/video projector—was exactly the same for hot and cold leads. That didn’t mean they all bought InFocus projectors—because there was no cultivation process in place. In fact, InFocus was getting almost exactly their market share worth of sales conversion from cold leads and a much higher conversion ratio from hot leads. It was pretty easy to formulate a theory as to why that was.

Yes, we were gratified to be able to find people who were ultimately going to buy a solution. But, since InFocus only sells through resellers, there was nothing we could do to influence the sales people to make some effort to close cold leads (and, as it turns out, that doesn’t work even when you directly control the sales force). We were frustrated because we were not able to do anything about it. So, we invented a cultivation process that is independent of the sales force, and everything started to change.