Marketing and Better Sales Leads

If you are acquiring leads for a sales force to close, then the most critical element you can pay attention to is lead maturation. It’s more important than qualification. It’s more important than scoring. It’s where all the money is, and if you ignore it, then it’s the reason why the sales force hates your guts.

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

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

You get 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 gather lots of qualifying information. You send the leads off to the sales force, and you get 50 bile-saturated emails telling you how much the leads suck. Ninety percent are just people kicking tires. So next time you decide to score and filter the leads. You take your basic lead parameters—how interested are they, have they established a budget, how big is the opportunity, when do they plan to purchase, is this the decision maker. You build a nice scoring matrix. Hot, warm, cold—ABCD—A1, A2, A3, B1, B2… whatever… You find that ninety percent of your leads are cold or C/D leads. So only ten percent 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 you get 50 vindictive emails screaming that they don’t have enough leads, and they are already talking to all the hot leads. Does any of this sound familiar? Here’s the real problem. While 90 percent 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 matured into a sales lead. Time and again, when we survey cold leads a year after acquisition, we find 80-90% of them 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. Then you will need an overarching strategy for how you will re-score these leads as they mature from cold to hot.

The biggest difference maturation makes is the trend for qualified, sales-ready leads. As long as you keep maturing prospects into leads, all your acquisition campaigns are additive. The maturation 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. Generally, in five iterations of acquisition coupled with maturation, the maturation lead flow is twice the lead flow from direct acquisition. At ten iterations, the maturation flow is typically five times the direct acquisition. And you’ll find that these are the best leads you’ve ever had—because they understand 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. Just don’t expect the sales force to feel any gratitude when your hard work sends them all to quota club—they HAVE to believe they did it all themselves in order to function.

The Maturation Process

One of our most important discoveries in the last ten years is that, with a maturation 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 one of our oldest clients. We discovered that the number of people who had bought a solution was exactly the same for hot or cold leads! That didn’t mean they all bought our client’s product, however, because the client has no maturation process in place. In fact, they were 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 we were frustrated because we were not able to do anything about it. So we built a maturation process that is independent of the sales force, and everything started to change. We were able to increase the return on investment measured directly from sales by several hundred percent. In one case, we achieved an ROI of over 1300% by adding maturation to an otherwise ordinary program. That’s a result worth a bit of extra effort.