Six-step Checklist for More Effective Lead Generation
Most lead generation is mediocre at best. Insourced or outsourced, there is too much dependence on digital marketing and tricks (cutesy approaches that turn people off) than effective outreach that provides value by delivering insights, and at the right time, a service or product that is wanted and needed.
Following is a checklist with tips on improving your lead generation results:
DEFINE A LEAD
Does every department in your company share a common definition of a lead?
Throw out alphabet soup lead criteria (such as BANT and ANUM) and focus on what I call the 3 Ps and an E:
Pain.
What specific need (for example, outdated technology that is causing the company to fail to offer capabilities that competitors offer) must the target have to be qualified as a lead?
Priority.
What compelling event (for example, a compliance issue such as GDPR or a solution that makes the company more competitive) causes the priority of fixing a pain to be sooner rather than later?
Process.
Once the pain and priority are agreed upon, who will be involved in an evaluation, what roles will they play and how does the company go about establishing a budget for this kind of purchase?
Environment.
What characteristic of the target’s organization must be present or absent (incumbent technology in place, bias against outsourcing, liability or conformance issue…)?
While 3 Ps and an E are objectives in qualifying a prospect, additional elements include standard market describers such as vertical, size, location, entity type.
These elements will help you home in on highly qualified opportunities and allow you to focus on positioning your product or services early in buying process so that you can beat the competition and, hopefully, define the evaluation rather than simply responding to it.
Without agreement on lead definition, forecasts are thin and inaccurate, there is no closed loop to measure the effectiveness of marketing programs and there is no accountability between marketing and sales.
Establish an unbiased review team to examine every lead that is not accepted by sales or is proactively rejected by sales and fix what is broken. This is what I call the judicial branch. See this blog for information about establishing a judicial branch.
TARGET, SEGMENT AND TEST
How often does your team analyze lists?
Keeping in mind that there is no such thing as a good list (and remembering that more expensive lists are not always better than less expensive ones), the only way to keep your team productive is to make sure that data is fresh by cleansing it continuously, analyzing characteristics that indicate propensities to buy, and testing to maximize segmentation efforts.
In one situation, we collaborated with a client that was about to mail 750 $20 “lumpy” mailers to prospects. I asked if they had assessed the list for validity. They had not. They felt because they had paid a lot of money for the list that it must be accurate. We offered to evaluate the list for free and found that over 50% of the mailings would have gone to the wrong geography and many of the company names had no contact associated with the record. The mail house would have mailed those packages anyway and wasted $7,500. The opportunity costs were significantly higher.
RESEARCH
Are folks responsible for reaching out to your market knowledgeable and prepared for quality conversations?
There is disagreement on the value of research. One side argues that you should just pick up the telephone and make the call. I maintain that calling in “cold” is unnecessary and unproductive.
The most obvious reason for this is that lists are not perfectly accurate. Why else would I, someone in the lead generation business, get multiple calls and emails from lead generation companies every week (and multiple calls over time from the same firms)? What should you do that is different? Employing a 4 x 4 research approach involves spending a total of four minutes looking at four different data sources:
The prospect’s website.
The contact’s LinkedIn profile (do you share mutual connections, have we collaborated with a previous employer of the prospect, does the prospect write, tweet or otherwise use social media for any shared areas of interest?).
The subjects of the prospect’s tweets.
A general online search to see what pops up. (One client has retained me at three different companies because our relationship jelled when I mentioned I had researched his passion for a medical condition he had survived).
ESTABLISH A CADENCE
Do you have a multi-touch, multi-media, multi-cycle strategy in place to multiply your lead-generation efforts?
For every prospect in every B2B sales lead generation program we oversee, a rigid cadence is documented, executed and assessed every hour of every day.
The alternative to defining optimal cadence is under-touching, over-touching or not touching important prospects. An example: I talked to a prospect a week or so ago about how being persistent, yet professional, was critical to reaching prospects. He told me he “got it.” He referred to calls he gets every day: “I’ll say to myself, that was a pretty good pitch, I don’t have time now but the next time that guy (or gal) calls back I will engage.’” Guess what? They never call back, he never engages, and the seller loses out. Make sure your team has a prescribed cadence for every program (that includes multiple cycles of contact over time).
LEAVE VOICEMAILS and EMAILS
Are you properly supporting your outbound calls?
An example cadence is ten-to-twelve touches over ten business days including four-to-six dials, supported by three voicemails and three emails. We build the timing of these touches into our clients’ CRM. Due to our dial, voicemail and email cadence, 20% to 30% of the leads generated for our clients are the result of a returned call, an email reply or what we call a scheduled call. I hear people say that they do not leave voicemails because they are ignored by the prospect. My response: How many calls will be returned if you do not leave a voicemail?
NURTURE
Are you getting maximum return on marketing programs?
Lead nurture programs triple the return on your lead generation. See this article for details on how this underutilized marketing activity—lead nurturing—can increase your lead rate from 5% to 15%.
How does your company stack up? Are you a well-run lead generation machine, or is there room for improvement?
As always, I value your questions, comments and views.