Sales Thinks Your Leads Stink. And yes, you can fix that! This is how. (Part 3)

You know the smell. It’s late and you’re driving on a deserted highway out in the country. The smell hits you like a ton of pungent, acrid bricks. Dead skunk. Your only thought is how to not get any of that on you as you carefully navigate the darkness seeking to avoid the putrid remains.

Now picture this. Sales thinks your “marketing qualified” (imaging the sales leader making sarcastic air quotes as she complains to you) stink like a dead skunk. That smell you try desperately to avoid on the road in the dark of night. Then the unthinkable: after describing the nauseatingly disgusting state of your (air quotes) leads, she asks for more. Who intentionally runs over that dead skunk? Is your Sales department stupid? Nope. Just uneducated. And it’s your job to educate them!

Remember the Brass Tacks questions?
Last week, we ran the math. (If you missed last week’s blog, click here. You’ll want to know the math behind the brass tacks!) Math is indisputable, but it doesn’t answer the question of “how?” This left us with three Brass Tacks questions:

1.     How many Contacts do we need at top of funnel to meet the required number of MQLs?

2.     What can we do to affect out conversion rates at each stage?

3.     What can we do to affect the time-in-stage to increase velocity?

We actually need to ask question 1 twice, once before we begin our exercise (to establish a benchmark) and again after we finish (to establish our improvement). In last week’s example, we needed 10,000 Contacts at the top of our funnel to reach the target number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). This established our benchmark segment size. (Again, click here to review how to calculate your waterfall.)

The answer to brass tacks question 2 is a lot more flexible, and requires your unique marketing skill set to execute. However, there are some guiding “Best Principles” that will help you get there quickly, regardless of your market or product.

Principle #1: Execute every program with a specific funnel objective in mind.

This is different from a shotgun approach that targets everyone at every stage in the buying process. Unless you are selling commodities and your only market advantage is price, it is unlikely your B2B buyer is going to find you out of nowhere and send in a million-dollar order based on a single online interaction with your company. Nobody seems to disagree with this fact, but I find it amazing how many people execute marketing programs in this manner.

Principle #2: Even if you’re right, you’re not right.

This means you need to test everything, even if it seems to be working. Improving conversion rates is a matter of playing a continuous game of “King of the Hill.” Your current champion is only the benchmark by which you will compare the next challenger. And as soon as a challenger dethrones the current champion, the game begins anew.

Principle #3: There’s not one answer for everything.

What works for one market or vertical may not work for another, so don’t assume someone else’s “best practice” will automatically work for you. For example, at a time when “best practice” was to send all emails as HTML, I tested this practice. It turned out not to be “best” at all for my application. In fact, text-only emails outperformed their HTML counterparts (as measured by click-throughs) by over 35%. Again, test everything, including “best practices.”

Affecting velocity (brass tacks question 3) is a matter of reducing time in stage for those stages up to a conversion stage, such as MQL. Similar to question 2, there are principles, rather than practices you should follow to decrease your time in stage. Remembering that we need to be executing every program with specific stage movement in mind, we can add two more principles to the mix:

Principle # 4: Know your buyer.

In order to accelerate your funnel, you must completely understand your buyer: who, what, when, how and why she buys. If you have not profiled your buyer, you have no hope of accelerating your funnel because you have no idea which parameters to change and, likely have no data to support those changes. As an example, if your product or service is highly reliant upon FY-driven buying cycles, does your MAP database contain FY start month? If not, how are you going to know when to begin delivering marketing messaging? Does your buyer rely heavily on input from a technical user to make purchasing decisions? Have you created the right content to help that buyer with the technical conversation, and is that communication a part of your funnel acceleration strategy?

Principle #5: Make sure you’re measuring the right thing.

Your MAP will require customization to automate and measure time in stage for your specific demand waterfall because your stage promotion and demotion rules are unique to your organization. Having a correctly defined waterfall program is the first step in measuring progression.  Once built, you need to measure your demand waterfall on a regular cadence – at least monthly, perhaps even weekly. The two key metrics you need to capture are:

1.     Total number of Contacts in each stage. From this metric, you will be able to calculate your stage conversion rates and cumulative conversion rates.

2.     Average time in stage for each stage.

You will want to keep a running log of these measurements to spot trends and measure improvement over time. In general, you want your funnel to move from looking like this:

Change the conversation.

Once you have a complete view of your demand waterfall and understand the factors that affect conversion rates and velocity, you can change the conversation. Following theses principles, you will know beforehand the who, what, when, how and why of your buyer’s journey and know what it will take to reach a specific goal. And you’ll have both the math and the data to back up your argument.

Notes:

You must agree with sales on the definition of a “sales-ready” lead.

There are only three components of Lead volume Marketing can control.

Learn to calculate each of these components and let the math do your talking for you.

This week we talked a lot about testing. Test your conversion rates. Play King of the Hill. Even test “best practices.” That’s a lot of testing. So how should you go about testing? Next week, we’ll begin a new series named Three ways A-B testing will improve your Marketing results.