On a Saturday evening in April 2000, Christopher Walken, Will Farrell and SNL hucksters doubling as the rock band Blue Oyster Cult delivered what has become one of the most watched Saturday Night Live skits ever – “More Cowbell”   

Today’s B2B Marketers are inundated with the hype cycle promoting more marketing cowbell. There are literally thousands of messages daily that promote new marketing automation software technology as the silver bullet that will solve all their ills. But the truth of the matter is, B2B marketers don’t need more silver bullets or more cowbells, what they need are more qualified leads that are sales ready. Realizing this ultimate business objective requires rethinking the lead management process that most B2B organizations have in place today. Simply capturing leads, automatically scoring them, and automatically flipping them off to sales as qualified leads is a huge mistake for B2B marketers. With sales teams under increased pressure of bigger quotas, fewer declared sales cycles, and smaller average deal sizes, they simply don’t have time to pursue anything except “qualified sales-ready opportunities.”
Getting more of those requires tight alignment between sales and marketing and requires each organization to break-down the functional boundaries that artificially separate them. Marketing must develop processes and put people in place that take raw inquiries and vet them against their target market’s buying journey profile...

• Are the inquiries with the right role?
• Are the inquiries even in their ideal target market?

Most of the time, this “vetting” can only take place with a voice-to-voice (V2V) engagement. Short-cutting these engagements takes Moment of Interest (MOI) follow up processes and techniques.
Here is what I mean by Moment of Interest – Studies were conducted in the past few years at MIT Sloan to determine the optimal telephone follow-up period for B2B leads. What they found is that the optimal window for phone follow up is within the first 16 minutes of a prospect’s online activity (email click-through or inbound opt-in). Here at OppSource, we advocate making the investments in the lead management process and operational design to accommodate this level Moment of Interest (MOI) follow up. Our own data suggests that connect rates are 9 times greater when our clients adhere to a 15 minute SLA for lead follow up. How would you rate your organization’s ability to design a lead management process that ensures raw inquiry follow-up within 16 minutes of their digital engagement?

Want to put more MOI in your lead management process, click on the link below and we’ll engage you at your Moment of Interest.

connect@oppsource.com
 

CSO Insights just recently published their latest Lead Management Optimization Survey. Their latest research shows that >70% of the firms surveyed either have no lead scoring process or an informal lead scoring process in place. The same survey indicated that over 50% of the survey respondents have no consensus or agreement in place between sales and marketing on what constitutes the definition of a qualified sales lead. Clearly this is problematic.

Renowned Psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the phrase “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” in the 1960’s. This is certainly true today for the marketing automation software vendors. With all the data suggesting that lead scoring or the lack thereof is a problem, then all you need is marketing automation software and it’s fixed – right? Wrong!!

Today’s marketing automation software is architected around contacts not accounts. Unfortunately, in the B2B world, it’s accounts that actually buy things. Thus, lead scoring all the contacts that respond to digital-based marketing messages does not help create more qualified leads for B2B sales professionals. Closing the gap on this requires finding the right influencers and decision makers in the accounts and then having conversations with them to identify their objectives, pain points, motivations for change, etc. With these critical pieces of intelligence in hand, a lead can be properly scored and qualified into sales ready or not.

All of this requires human intervention in the lead management process. As inquiries generated by marketing are augmented with new contacts through conversations, referrals and research, the collection of interactions both digital and conversational make their way into bona-fide sales leads. Only when these personal contacts and interactions occur can a lead be effectively qualified and handed off to sales as sales-ready opportunities. If you would like to learn more about our best practices in lead management, download our white paper “Six Pillars to an Effective Lead Management Program.”