Lead Lifecycle Management - Home - MarketOne€¦ · 1 Lead Lifecycle Management W ith increasing access to information on the Internet, the customer’s buying process has radically

Lead Lifecycle Management

How High Performance Marketers are Confronting Dramatic Changes in Customer Behavior

www.marketone.com© 2008 MarketOne International, Inc

1 Lead Lifecycle Management

With increasing access to information on the Internet, the customer’s buying process has radically changed. As a result, the

rules of business-to-business (B2B) marketing are changing, too. Push marketing is giving way to pull marketing.

No longer reliant on sellers to educate them, customers are moving down decision cycles on their own. As buyers increasingly go online to conduct research and evaluate sellers, RFIs and RFPs play a diminishing role in their decisions. Instead, buyers are downloading white papers, case studies, product sheets and other actionable content that facilitates their discovery efforts. This gives them greater leverage in the buying process while leaving sellers in the dark — often excluded from their decisions altogether.

Unfortunately, many marketers are unprepared for the enormous wave of change that is now crashing over them. At a time when it is increasingly crucial to pull prospects in, monitor their behavior and engage them in a relevant fashion, they continue to push their products through irrelevant messages and unwanted cold calls.

With no ability to track the online movements of their prospects, they have little insight into their needs, interests and behaviors. With insufficient lead generation and nurturing capabilities, they have little ability to influence the decisions of their prospects. And, in the absence of lead scoring capabilities, they cannot determine when leads are truly sales-ready. This merely exacerbates the existing tensions between sales and marketing.

By contrast, a growing number of high performance marketers are embracing new B2B marketing technologies enabling them to generate and nurture leads in ever more sophisticated ways. They are identifying the interests of prospective buyers at an early stage in the decision cycle and actively engaging them throughout with relevant messages. They are selectively deploying tele-prospecting and tele-nurturing — at the stages of a decision when human interaction is most appropriate and effective. Most importantly, they are producing the leads necessary to ensure their sales teams succeed.


What must B2B marketers do to remain on the forefront of this coming wave instead of drowning in it? They must actively adopt lead lifecycle management (LLM) — a powerful new approach to B2B marketing that maximizes the production of sales-ready leads.

In this executive report, we’ll explore how LLM effectively enables organizations to: • Identify and engage new prospects• Develop these prospects through nurturing • Convert these valued prospects into “sales-ready” leads

As this white paper will show, today’s leading B2B marketers know they must aggressively manage the lead lifecycle to ensure sales teams meet their revenue targets.

The powerful wave of change now hitting B2B marketing will have a far-reaching impact on companies. Some firms will be undermined by its force. Others will learn to ride it to magnificent effect. Let’s explore the key aspects of this coming wave:

Customers Get Smarter and Move Down the Decision Cycle on their Own.

In years past, the buy cycles and sales cycles were in synch — either because sellers created the buyer’s perceived need or because sellers possessed information that buyers needed to initiate their decision process.

But no more. “The buyer’s cycle has become decoupled from the seller’s,” argue Barry Trailer and Jim Dickie in the Harvard Business Review.1

While an information asymmetry previously favored sellers, it now favors buyers. Through Internet-based research, they now have access to white papers, case studies, webinars, web sites, research reports and even price lists. They also rely on analysts and other third-party advisors. They have become smarter and gained greater negotiating power.

As a result, sellers are often on the defensive — unaware of the buyer’s decision status if they are aware of the buyer at all. By contrast, sellers that engage the prospect at the earliest point in the decision process have an inherent advantage. They can monitor and influence the decision — positioning themselves as trusted advisors and sellers of choice.

Marketing Under Pressure to Engage Prospects in a More Relevant and Consistent Fashion.

Research suggests that companies are far more likely to turn an early stage lead into a qualified lead if they are able to present relevant communications and offers to their prospective clients — and consistently nurture their prospects to the point of sales readiness.

Relevant communication — whether automated or human — increases the likelihood of positive lead outcomes by 50%, according to research

Market Drivers: New Sales Pressures and Customer Demands Shake up B2B Marketing


1. Trailer, Barry and Dickie, Jim, “Understanding What Your Sales Manager is Up Against,” Harvard Business Review, July-August, 2006.


from MarketingSherpa and KnowledgeStorm.2 In a world of information overload, customers are no longer willing to pay attention to messages and offers that are not directly relevant to them. “The quality of a company’s leads has everything to do with how the message, positioning and format of the content resonate with its target audience,” the researchers state.

Relevance revolves around presenting the right resource at the right time. In the decision cycle, buyers need different resources as they pass from an awareness phase to a problem definition phase to a solution definition phase and then on to a vendor selection phase.

In order to engage buyers and help them make smart decisions, it’s critical to offer them an appropriate mix of automated and human engagement. Automated engagement typically comes in the form of white papers, case studies, and demos as well as other content, messages and offers that can be presented in an automated fashion — typically online. Human engagement requires a personal touch — a well-timed phone call from an inside sales rep, for instance, designed to talk through current concerns, respond to an online download, or inform the prospect of a relevant offer or opportunity.

Continuous contact also matters if sellers are to remain in the peripheral vision of their prospects — available to them when the time to buy arrives. Reed Business conducted a study suggesting that as much as 77% of potential sales come from longer-term leads — ones that require consistent nurturing over time until the prospect is ready to purchase.3 Lead nurturing, argues the study’s author, can make sales 40% more productive at closing sales.4

Growing Emphasis on Lead Lifecycle in an Effort to Maximize Sales-Ready Leads.

Surveys of sales executives suggest their top concern these days is ensuring they have an adequate number of sales-ready leads. In order

2. Marketing Sherpa and KnowledgeStorm, “How Technology Marketers Meet Buyers’ Appetite for Content,” March 2007. 3. Carroll, Brian, “Lead Nurturing - Ripening the Right Bananas,” Start with a Lead blog, http://www.startwithalead.com/article.asp?ARTICLEID=162&PRINTABLE=TRUE4. Macintosh, M.H. (Mac), “Build business for less: Use B2B marketing for sales lead generation and qualification,” Macintosh’s Blog, http://www.sales-lead-experts.com/tips/articles/math.cfm#


to produce these leads, marketing is becoming increasingly focused on the lead lifecycle.

The lead lifecycle is a sequential process a prospective client must pass through in order to become a forecast-worthy opportunity. Early stage prospects (or “suspects”) have been reached or contacted and now have a limited degree of awareness about the availability of a solution to a given problem. As their interest in a solution and their desire to solve their problem grow, they become a sales-ready lead. It is at this stage that a sales team will typically engage the prospect and determine whether they are forecast-worthy.

However, SiriusDecisions, a research firm, has found that an extraordinary number of deals are lost because a seller is unwilling to nurture a pros-pect to the point of being truly sales-ready. It estimates that roughly 80% of interested B2B prospects that enter a firm’s sales funnel will purchase a product or solution within a two-year timeframe — though a majority of them will buy from a competitor.5 Lead leakage, in other words, is a vast, unsolved problem that is motivating companies to manage the lead lifecycle with increasing rigor and attention.

5. Sirius Decisions, cited in Eloqua Automating Demand Presentation, http://www.moccabayarea.org/documents/presentations/2.1.07.presentations/Eloqua%20MOCCA_Lead%20Management.pdf

Given the need for marketers to adapt new practices and concepts, it’s unclear at this point which organizations will be agile enough to adapt to the new market drivers we’ve discussed. Will your sales team close a sufficient number of deals to meet — much less exceed — its sales quotas?

While research suggests B2B sales organizations generally have been successful at meeting their quotas in recent years, the pressure to perform is about to get much higher. Sales teams must be able to continue loading pipelines with deal-worthy opportunities if they are to meet their performance objectives.

Sales and marketing units, however, are now being forced to both confront a problem that threatens to undermine them both: an insufficient number of sales ready leads.

This problem falls under the immediate responsibility of marketing. It is marketing’s job to produce sales-ready leads — leads that meet the criteria necessary to hand them off to sales for follow up. However, sales teams also have a critical stake in the outcome of these efforts. Without sales-ready leads, they obviously will be unable to build their pipelines of forecast-worthy opportunities and close a sufficient number of profitable deals to meet their quotas.

In order to produce a steady stream of sales-ready leads, it will be necessary to address the three key dimensions of the problem:

Inability to Effectively Generate Leads.

Central to marketing success is the ability to attract a sufficient volume of prospects at the outset. But the marketplace is noisy and prospects are constantly assaulted with marketing messages of all kinds. Too many sellers only contribute to this noise by filling the market with messages that are all about them and their solutions. That may not be appropriate if the prospect is still trying to understand the scope and magnitude of a particular problem — or learn how other companies are addressing it.

The key to attracting more prospects and engaging them at an early stage of a decision is relevance. It’s critical that content, messaging and communications be relevant to a particular prospect at a particular point in the buying process. At the earliest stage of the process, it is

Confronting the Key Barrier to Strong Sales:Too Few Sales-Ready Leads



still possible to become the trusted advisor to the prospect and provide resources that help guide and influence a decision. But that won’t happen unless sellers are engaging prospects with the right messages at the right time.

They also must be responsive. According to a study David Elkington of InsideSales.com and Prof. James Oldroyd of MIT, calls placed within five minutes of receiving a web lead have the highest likelihood of making contact. The odds of making contact and qualifying the lead drop off dramatically with time. This suggests companies need a policy and available tele-resources that enable rapid response.

Inability to Consistently and Cost Effectively Nurture Leads.

One of the greatest mistakes that marketing makes is handing off leads when they are not sales-ready. Sales will ignore them and they will leak out of the funnel. But research suggests most of these prospects will make a purchase within just 24 months.

With this in mind, it’s vital for marketing to nurture these leads to the point of sales-readiness. This requires consistency in contact. The prospect must be engaged at regular intervals with appropriate

Before Lead Lifecycle Management

Warm leadsleak out

MarketingFocus

SalesFocus

Identify ConvertDevelop

messages and offers — whether it’s an invitation to attend a webinar or download a white paper. Tele-nurturing teams also can engage the prospect periodically by phone, gaining a deeper understanding of the prospect’s current concerns.

However, cost-effectiveness is another vital success factor. Companies undermine their lead nurturing and management efforts when they deploy the wrong resources at the wrong time — driving up unnecessary expense.

Email interactions, which may represent relatively low impact yet low cost, may be most appropriate in the earliest stages of a decision, for instance. Tele-nurturing interactions, which can have a greater impact at moderate cost, may be more appropriate as the decision progresses. Too many marketers struggle to smartly make these distinctions — and misallocate their limited budgets as a result.

Inability to Track and Score Leads.

Many marketers struggle to determine when a lead is ready to pass to sales or else they pass everything on to sales. Perhaps they have gathered business cards at a trade show. If they simply hand those names off to sales and call them “leads,” they are likely to be ignored.

Marketing and sales are now challenged to define the characteristics of a sales-ready lead and then assign it a score based on those parameters.

The core challenge for marketers, then, is to gain deep visibility into the prospect’s needs, intentions and behavior throughout a decision process and score leads based on these factors. Has the prospect attended multiple webinars and downloaded various forms of collateral? Has the prospect been contacted by a tele-services group and identified as planning a purchase? Has the prospect visited the web site multiple times and downloaded a product data sheet that indicates an intent to purchase soon?

One recent study by MarketingSherpa found that 73% of B2B marketers had not implemented a lead scoring system.6 Without the ability to track such factors and score leads, marketers are unable to credibly


6. MarketingSherpa, “Lead Nurturing Best Practices: New Data, Charts, Tips to Put More Punch in Your Cultivation Tactics,” August 6, 2008.

vouch for the value of their leads when they hand them off to sales. Furthermore, sales teams are ill equipped to approach the prospect with a relevant sales message.

• • • • •

Sales and marketing have often struggled to get along. They have a tendency to point fingers of blame at each other when expected results don’t materialize. But misalignment between the two is no longer an option.

Both groups must now work together to define, develop and act on sales-ready leads. This is the key barrier to closing profitable deals and meeting sales quotas.

So what does a solution to this challenge look like? The solution, as we will see, lies in aggressively managing the lead lifecycle.



As high performance B2B marketers have already discovered, lead lifecycle management (LLM) is a powerful new way to engage prospective customers in the course of their own decision cycles and maximize the production of sales-ready leads. It’s a smart mix of automated engagement and human engagement. LLM integrates marketing automation with tele-services — creating a relevant, consistent and cost-effective approach to prospect nurturing and pipeline development.

By aggressively focusing on LLM, marketers gain greater visibility into the status and score of a given lead — based on the needs, intentions and behaviors of the particular prospect. This enables marketing to appropriately manage the human side of pipeline development — deploying tele-prospecting and tele-nurturing resources when they can have maximum impact. It also enables them to hand off the lead to sales only when it has matured to the point of true sales readiness.

Marketers who focus on LLM commit to a process of producing sales-ready leads in an ongoing and disciplined fashion. Indeed, companies that have smartly combined automated and human engagement have effectively doubled their output in terms of the number of leads accepted by sales without increasing the number of inside sales reps. Through the LLM process, marketing and sales unite to generate an array of valuable benefits:

• Increased Number of Sales Ready Leads• Higher Acceptance of Leads by Sales• Higher Close Rates — Generating Higher Sales and Profitability• Enhanced Visibility into Buyer Behavior and Purchase Dynamics• Superior and Demonstrable Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)

LLM represents a rigorous, yet flexible framework for bringing discipline to the marketing process. It enables marketers to take an integrated, multi-modal approach to campaigns — tracking everything from search engine click-throughs to email marketing to tele- prospecting and deploying the right tactic at the right time in the most cost effective manner. It allows them to plug the leaks in the sales funnel and ensure prospective clients stay in play. Further, it lets marketers actively analyze, test, learn, refine and improve their marketing approaches based on results in the field.

Maximizing Sales-Ready Leads Through Lead Lifecycle Management

Among the 5 core capabilities of LLM are:

• Campaign Planning. Marketers who seek to better manage their lead lifecycles must have a strong grasp of their customer’s buying cycle, as all planning starts here. They need to produce content for each stage of the buying cycle. Ideally, a “buyer persona” is developed for each solution or offer. This ensures they can deliver the right message to the right prospect. Relevance is paramount. They must also have a firm understanding of the tactics they intend to employ — whether its newsletters, white paper promotions or others. They need to know how these campaigns are enabled by their marketing automation platforms and further supported through tele-services. Strategic forethought is vital. Finally, they need to recognize that lead development is a process, not an event, and plan with a time horizon that extends at least 12 months.

• Marketing Automation and Lead Management. Marketing automation is the technology driven platform enabling marketers to engage prospects throughout the lead lifecycle. By automating the management of campaigns and interactions, it allows marketers to deliver the right message at the right time to the right prospect. Based on a prospect’s profile of attributes and behaviors, the platform can serve up relevant content on an ongoing basis. Rich


After Lead Lifecycle Management

MarketOneLLM Focus

Identify ConvertDevelop

Lead-nurturingprograms plug

the leak.

and relevant content, presented through marketing automation as opposed to ad hoc campaigns, allows marketers to educate their prospects even before they have engaged them in a sales dialogue. That’s an important factor. Recent research from MarketingSherpa found that technology buyers found their sellers (and not the other way around) in 75-80% of the cases where a deal was done.7 Marketing automation enables marketers to track their prospects in these early stages of a decision cycle, building trust and confidence while preparing for a credible sales interaction.

• Lead Scoring. To ensure leads are managed rigorously, it’s necessary that key stakeholders — such as sales and marketing — collaborate to develop lead scoring mechanisms. Such parties should identify attributes of a strong prospect and the prospect’s propensity to buy. But they should also define the criteria for a sales-ready lead. Scoring is the mechanism that not only connects marketing automation to tele-services interactions, but determines when a lead is mature enough to be handed off to sales. Special triggers — tied to the score — can provide alerts when a phone interaction is appropriate. They also indicate when a lead is sales ready by tracking the needs, intentions and behaviors of buyers.


7. MarketingSherpa, Business Technology Marketing Benchmarking Guide 2007-2008, 2007

Q1 Nurturing

75 Qualifiedand Interested

15 Qualified,Interested,Sales-ready

Convert

Q2 Nurturing



Convert

Q3 Nurturing



Convert

Metrics of Lead Nurturing

1000Suspects

100 Qualified andInterested


Convert

Nurturing will increase the valueof forecast-worthy deals.

• Tele-services and Delivery to Sales. As prospects move further down the decision cycle and indicate a propensity to buy, it becomes important to engage through a tele-tactic — the human dimension of pipeline development. While such activities typically are more expensive than outbound email and web-based interactions, they are also likely to have a higher impact in terms of influencing decision behavior and building trust. Sellers can deploy appropriate tele- services resources based on several factors including the stage of a decision, the complexity of the deal, and the value of the order. Different tele-reps may be deployed depending on whether the objective is to set up a sales appointment or diagnose the customer’s current level of pain. The key is to move the prospect forward using the most appropriate and cost-effective resources relative to the goal. “Use specially trained inside salespeople or an outsourced telemarketing vendor that specializes in B2B nurturing,” advises MarketingSherpa. “You don’t want them to try to close deals in these calls because your prospects likely aren’t ready to make a purchase.”8 When the prospect reaches the point of sales readiness, the tele-services team can turn the lead over to the field sales team. Companies who have successfully deployed an LLM strategy have doubled the number of sales-ready leads they send to sales without increasing the number of inside sales reps.


8. MarketingSherpa, “Lead Nurturing Best Practices: New Data, Charts, Tips to Put More Punch in Your Cultivation Tactics,” August 6, 2008.

The Interplay of Automated and Human Engagement

Automated Engagement

Real-Time Alerts

Lead Scoring

Online Behavior Monitoring

Tells When to CallProspect/Customer

Tells Who to Call/How toPrioritize Rep Resources

Tells What to Communicate

Increase # of Call Completions/Call Yield

Increase # of Sales-Ready Leads, Increase Sales Close Ratio

Increase Relevance of Interaction, Build Trust With Prospect

Human Engagement Impact

• Process Feedback and Refinement. The final element of the LLM approach concerns continual improvement. By gaining visibility into what’s working and what isn’t through their reporting systems, B2B marketers become increasingly proficient at investing their limited resources for maximum returns. Marketing reports allow them to evaluate campaign outcomes and re-allocate resources to the areas that represent the greatest likelihood of success. They capture campaign response rates — and even dive into individual accounts to provide specific analysis. When marketing automation and tele-services reporting are integrated with a firm’s CRM system, companies can precisely measure their return on marketing investment (ROMI). They can track prospects from lead to sale — measuring the impact of their marketing efforts with increasing precision in a closed loop fashion.

It all comes back to sales-ready leads. The factor that will differentiate the best from the rest in the coming years is being able to maximize the production of these actionable, highly qualified leads. To excel at the production of these leads, marketing organizations must aggressively manage the lead lifecycle.

Marketing must be able to engage prospects in a highly relevant way and deploy the right resources at the right time to produce these sales-ready leads. By demonstrating a high proficiency in the 5 core capabilities of LLM, companies will achieve the outstanding marketing and sales results they now seek.


The coming years will be loaded with trials and turbulence for many — if not most — B2B marketers. They will see expectations on marketing grow — and too often, they will disappoint. The average tenure of the CMO is just 18 months at this point. How will it possibly lengthen in this environment?

It won’t. The critical question for people reading this report is whether they intend to be average or, rather, exceptional. The average marketing group — one that is slow to recognize the coming wave of change — will experience diminishing performance in the next few years. By contrast, marketers will thrive when they understand their essential role is to produce sales-ready leads and take aggressive steps to meet that objective.

Companies win when they deploy the right resources at the right time with the right message. They need a smart mix of automated and human engagement, depending on the needs of a prospective customer and the stage of a decision. Indeed, they must aggressively leverage the intelligent capabilities associated with marketing automation while ensuring the human dimension associated with tele-prospecting and tele-nurturing is smartly applied to build customer confidence.

The breakthroughs in B2B marketing will be experienced by companies that actively embrace lead lifecycle management. These will be the companies that become trusted advisors to their clients, guiding them through a complex decision process and differentiating themselves from rivals who merely push messages. Marketers who rigorously, consistently and cost effectively manage the lead lifecycle will produce measurable and demonstrable results. They will be the ones who take B2B marketing to the next level of performance.

Conclusion: Breakthroughs in B2B Marketing


MarketOne is defining the future of business-to-business telemarketing. Our Lead Lifecycle Management platform delivers a powerful blend of e-marketing technology and tele-qualification services to deliver exceptional ROI on demand generation spend. With operational centers in London, Boston, Tokyo and Barbados, our reach is truly global. Our team of 200 sales analysts, covering 16 native languages, will tele-nurture your best prospects and transition them to sales-ready opportunities. MarketOne’s service offerings range from complete lead lifecycle management, to telemarketing point solutions focused on lead generation, lead nurturing, account profiling, and event recruitment. 18 of the 20 most successful global technology companies count on MarketOne to manage their lead flow.

About MarketOne International


Forrester Research recently profiled Inquira’s lead development system that drives more than 80% of the deals closed by its field sales team. Marketing automation software helps this maker of intelligent search software gather implicit data — like site visits to high-value content (versus visits to the career page), search engine click-throughs, and registration form submissions. Through this approach, they learned how prospect activity is a better predictor of future lead closure than firmographic criteria like company revenue, industry, or contact title.

“Inside sales staff members use customer response data and problem-solving conversations instead of scripts to engage potential buyers,” according to Forrester. “The result? The firm doubled the number of qualified prospects it sends to sales without increasing the number of inside reps… Inside sales reps [also] work leads that respond by engaging them in solution-specific conversations that leave prospects thinking, ‘Gee, this company really understands my needs.’”

Case in Point: Inquira


Aon Corp. has turned lead lifecycle management into a powerful force for growth. The Chicago-based provider of insurance and risk management products in the corporate market is now using marketing automation to manage multi-modal B2B campaigns and tying it to tele-services to optimize sales-ready leads.

The company presently engages prospects with webinars, e-newsletter, email, direct mail, landing pages and event invitations — tracking performance on each campaign through its marketing automation system. Once the prospect has been contacted through such vehicles, tele-services teams are deployed to evaluate the programs that prospects currently have in place and determine whether other solutions may be appropriate. Such efforts are paying off handsomely: Total 2007 revenues increased 9% to $7.5 billion while net income climbed to $864 million.

Case in Point: AON


Soon after taking his position four years ago, Simon Peel, senior vice president of marketing and strategy for Cast Iron Systems, realized his company would need to reconsider how it generated sales-ready leads. Having relied solely on net new leads in the past, the company was not realizing the full returns on its marketing investment.

“We had accumulated tens of thousands of leads in our database, but we weren’t in contact with them on a regular basis,” says Peel, whose company is now the leading company in software-as-a-service (SaaS) integration. “Like most marketing departments, we were focused on generating new leads. That is what sales wants. That is what marketing delivers. But the longer you are head of marketing, the more you realize this can’t be your only focus. You can’t build a relationship if you don’t nurture leads. And no one is going to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars with someone they don’t know. Relationships matter.”

While Cast Iron was focusing on contacting net new leads, it was strug-gling with how to nurture its 20,000 name database. Tele-prospecting reps were calling on these prospects without any real prioritization. There was no productive way to score leads based on whether a prospect had visited the web site and downloaded a white paper, for instance. “We couldn’t determine who to contact unless they explicitly raised their hands and said, ‘Call me now,’” Peel adds. “We had no way to prioritize based on their online behavior — their ‘digital body language.’”

This state of affairs encouraged the company to invest in a marketing automation system — one that would enhance its automated and human interactions with prospects. Indeed, the company’s marketing approach became far more rigorous, disciplined and precise when it implemented a solution from Eloqua. The software enabled the marketing team to automate multi-step campaigns, monitor the progression of prospects through a decision process and engage them in a far more relevant, personal and timely fashion. The company also has streamlined its tele-prospecting process, enabling reps to focus on the most highly qualified leads and opportunities. They are no longer simply pursuing names in a database.

Further, the company has invested more actively in decision-driving content such as white papers, case studies and webinars — resources that help guide prospects through a buying process and enable the company to determine their decision stage. “We’ve had to get a little sharper on the content,” says Peel. “We’ve had to create a dialogue of

Case in Point: Cast Iron Nurtures Leads, Doubles Rep Productivity and Drives Annual Growth to 100%


content rather than just one-off pieces. So there’s a series of materials that go out — each piece logically linked to the next. We’ve had to create more content than we did before and we’ve had to think about it a little more, but it’s all reusable. And when you consider the true cost of a qualified lead [through other approaches], you realize it’s a good investment.”

What has been the result? “Now, we only pass very qualified opportunities over to sales and that’s confirmed by the fact that we have a very stringent acceptance process,” explains Peel. “We hand opportunities to sales, but they don’t have to accept them. The sales team, however, noticed pretty quickly that the quality of opportunities being passed to them had increased and started accepting them at a more rapid rate.”

The tele-prospecting team, meanwhile, now begins each day by pursuing the 300 most interested prospects in their specific geographies. “We’ve integrated Eloqua, WebEx, SalesForce.com, and our automated outbound calling system using our own products,” he adds. “So, literally, the tele-prospecting reps put on a headset, the phone rings and they speak to the people who voted themselves the most interested prospects through their digital body language.”

As a result, the productivity of the tele-prospecting team has taken off. “We are able to feed many more opportunities into the pipe than we had been able to before,” says Peel. “By only talking to the people who are most interested, our conversion ratios doubled. They went from 10 qualified opportunities per tele-prospecting rep per month to about 20. They are talking to people that are interested as opposed to getting the cold shoulder constantly.”

These results have also strengthened Peel’s position with his board of directors. “I am able to show them solid results and that I have a handle on my business,” he says. “It’s clear I am focusing all my resources only on the most important people — those who are interested — and it shows. While marketing teams in start-ups normally generate just 15-20% of their business, our marketing team is the source of 80% of our business. The results have been remarkable.”

The most impressive statistic, however, is probably the company’s overall growth numbers. In the past year, the company has grown 100% — demonstrating the power and potential of an advanced approach to demand generation and lead lifecycle management.


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Lead Lifecycle Management - Home - MarketOne€¦ · 1 Lead Lifecycle Management W ith increasing access to information on the Internet, the customer’s buying process has radically