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 Telesales.
Telemarketing. Inside Sales. What could be more tactical, more of a
backwater?
Most
people think this way. But what other business process is staffed mainly
with junior people, yet is critical enough to cause the demise of a VP in 6 months,
and the CEO in a year? Maybe it's worth a bit of your time after all.
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Hot News
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Take-Aways
Marketing
knows how to mass- produce low-grade leads. Sales Reps want prospects
that are deeply interested and closable. There's a huge gap here. The process of lead
cultivation and enrichment should not be left to either of them.
The
organization in-between -- sometimes called telesales, sometimes
telemarketing, sometimes inside sales -- is where this refinement should
happen.
These
folks need to have tools and training, but they also must have native
talent for phone and email communication. You want equal parts
persuasiveness and persistence.
Measure
the right things: conversion rates, length of queues, number of
meetings, and number of sales cycles started. Get beyond number of
dials as soon as you can: if you're stuck with problems there, you'll never get
to excellence.
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Best Practices
Have
-- and enforce the use of -- standard terminology for leads and pipeline
stages across your company. Embed these in the way your SFA system
works.
Be
dead serious about qualification: it's almost impossible to qualify
too hard. Make sure that the qualification criteria are realistic, and
modify them if you find your sales reps actually use a different set of
criteria to spend their time.
Avoid
lead cherry-picking behavior. Know that this is a sign of bad qualification
criteria or a lack of sales discipline.
Align
incentives for Marketing, Telemarketing / Telesales / ISRs, and Sales
reps. The goal is to have unified goals and coherent behaviors.
Be
willing to grow your telemarketing/telesales/ISRs. They're
inexpensive -- why not have an inside person for every two reps, or even
more than that?
Budget
wholistically across sales, telesales/telemarketing/ISRs, and the marketing
budget. Keep all of them in balance -- of if you're talking to the
CFO, starve them equally.
Have
all your Telemarketing / Telesales / ISRs in one location (HQ) for each
country you operate in.. Manage them tightly, but make sure every
Sales Rep feels they are working
for them.
Choose your telemarketing/ telesales/ISRs for three key talents:
ability to research on the web, ability to improvise, and ability to quickly
get emotionally in tune with the prosepct.
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Telesales / Telemarketing:
the Linchpin
You'll
notice I said "business process" in the previous paragraph.
Marketing, telesales/telemarketing, and Sales are part of the same business
process: revenue generation. As
I've
written
before
(3 separate links there), it's completely appropriate that they not
report to the same VP, but it's all too common that they are committing the sin
of not working together.
Marketing
works furiously to create what they call leads. If the metrics are too
simplistic (fairly often), the incentive system will reward creation of lots of
"leads" that are very low quality. Marketing can site industry
statistics that 85% of those leads will buy from someone in a year.
So they say, "mission
accomplished" once they hit their number.
Meanwhile,
over in Sales, people quickly discover that the "leads" aren't very
hot. So they cherry-pick what look to be the most interesting
ones...typically leaving 90%+ of them untouched. Some
nasty side effects occur:
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Marketing
has generated too many "leads" for Sales to actually put through the
full qualification process. So, the Sales team ignores some leads that
could turn into business: effectively, they're qualifying too hard by
not really qualifying most leads at all.
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Ironically,
at the same time the
"leads" that they do cherry pick will often be
over-invested in. This is in the hope that some business is actually
there, and the company looks sexy.
Effectively, Sales is not qualifying these leads hard enough.
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The
yield -- in terms of Sales cycles that go somewhere -- is too low. So
the Sales VP complains there aren't enough leads. And it's true, the
Reps don't have enough solid stuff to work on. But "more
leads" is fool's gold.
The
discussion quickly moves to "poor lead quality," so new measures and
incentives are attempted. But because lead quality isn't consistently
defined (and in fact is the wrong measure), things don't get much
better.
The
root problem is that neither Sales nor Marketing is optimizing
the cost of
customer acquisition. The Marketing VP is throwing a lot of money at
generating too many empty leads. The Sales VP is using what is arguably the most
expensive resource in the company (Sales Reps) to do a job that is time
consuming and repetitious: lead cultivation and enrichment. They
should be spending their time working the funnel, not trying to fill it.
Lack of Enrichment
To
borrow a metaphor, Sales is like a nuclear reactor: it doesn't matter how much
uranium ore you have, power plants just won't work without enriched
fuel. The goal is to have the expensive sales reps work only with
enriched leads. The marketing function knows how to mass-produce the raw
"ore," but it takes a Sales touch -- people on the phone -- to purify
and enrich the "revenue fuel."
This
is where a well-run and tightly measured team of telesales / telemarketing / ISR
people comes
in. They
can spend the time to attend to a large number of leads, increase their level of
interest, consistently qualify them,  and bring them to the point where they want
to watch your on-line demo or take that first meeting with the sales rep.
This means high-touch cultivation over what is often months. Neither
Marketing folks nor Sales Reps are very good or economical at this task.
I
hate to sound like a business process management (BPM) purist, but specific
words really matter in the revenue business process. Like, what's a "lead."
Sloppiness or inconsistency about terms can cause a lot of waste and
finger-pointing. I recommend that your firm agree on a basic set of terms
that everyone (including the board, if they're into micro- managing) use when
talking about the revenue-generation business process.
Here is my standard terminology: use it as is, or modify it for your business... but
standardize on something and use it!
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Names
are people who attend an event but don't talk to you, are in the audience
for an analyst conference, or are unlucky enough to have their contact info
on a CD-ROM or a list you rented from a broker. These people have
expressed no interest in your solution or service, but they are part
of your target market space. Or they are people who had expressed
interest in the past, but you disqualified them (or even lost them to a
competitor). Send marketing materials and newsletters to these folks
basically forever: until they "unsubscribe" or their
email address bounces, consider these people as targets.
Marketing is the exclusive owner and processor of Names.
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Leads
are people who declared interest within the last 30 days. They talked to you at an event, or registered for something on your web
site. Leads are highly perishable, and must be contacted fast.
For example, someone who talked to you at a tradeshow will barely remember your conversation a week later. Someone who registered at your
website may not even recall having visited 24 hours later. So a
service level agreement (SLA) needs to be set up about how fast marketing
gets leads get
into the SFA system, and how quickly the contact attempts (both email and
phone) happen. It is a good plan to have a schedule of contact attempts
stretching out for a full month (with less frequent attempts over time). If no conversation has occurred in a month, leads revert to
names. Telesales / telemarketers / ISRs should be the exclusive owner
and processor of Leads, although marketing should provide the content (e.g., white papers,
scripts, emails)
to assist the process.
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 Contacted
Leads are people in discussion with Telesales / Telemarketing /
ISRs. They are not qualified yet, but they are being cultivated with
information and offers of light-weight engagement that don't involve a
sales rep's time (webinars...). Contacted Leads may stay in this
state for months or even quarters -- no problem, because they're not in the
"funnel" yet and are being groomed as future pipeline. Make
sure to use "tickler" tasks, as contacted leads may actually be in
the hopper longer than the half-life of your telesales / telemarketing
reps. Contacted leads should be exclusively owned and processed by Telesales /
Telemarketing / ISRs.
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Qualified
Leads are people who have passed the qualification criteria, but may
not yet have had their first conversation with Sales. A qualified lead
is subject to re- qualification by the sales rep before it is accepted by the
field. If the rep doesn't believe that it's worth putting sales
time into a qualified lead yet (e.g., she doesn't smell a deal here), the qualified lead
stays with the Telesales / Telemarketing / ISR person for further
cultivation. When things are going right, people stay as in the qualified lead
state for only a few days while appointment schedules are coordinated with
the rep. Qualified leads are owned by Telesales, but shared with
the Sales reps.
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Opportunity
Contacts are people whom Sales has accepted: there's an
opportunity, and a sales cycle with the contacts has begun.
Opportunity contacts are exclusively owned and handled by Sales and their
SEs.
Outsourcing? Automation?
It
seems that you can't talk about a business process without commenting on how to
outsource or automate it (maybe that's what gave BPM such a bad name  ).
In this particular case, the Telesales / Telemarketing / ISR function is dealing
with highly perishable and sensitive assets: your future pipeline.
Details and finesse -- even tone of voice and attitude -- really matter. Consequently,
only some of their activities can be routinized enough to be automated or
outsourced. I do recommend
automating a lot of the initial email outreach (implement a sequential auto-responder
or other marketing automation tool), but once there is
any serious engagement your people must take over. It's pretty much the
same story for the telephone work: use outsourcers to get phone numbers,
update email addresses, or even figure out overall org charts. But when
it's time for phone conversations about your value proposition and market
differentiation, these must almost always be done by your people.
No
Weenies -- coming in September
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