Producing Revenue with Lead Management – Interview with Carlos Hidalgo

Two lead management experts, Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of the Annuitas Group, and Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo, had the chance to riff on a few hot topics in B2B marketing, including the current state of marketing automation, the decision of the Annuitas Group to go “vendor neutral” and, obviously, lead management best practices. Read below for an overview and some quick tips.

Nowadays, Marketers aren’t just talking about tactical elements, such as email open rates. They are thinking about how they can help their company grow.

So whenever you think about metrics, it has to go back to revenue. What is your pipeline contribution? What is your return on investment? You must also evaluate the marketing medium. Is email giving you the best return on your investment? Is it live events? Direct mail? Marketers also need to measure their contribution to overall pipeline. For instance, if you’re going after new revenue, what percentage is marketing going to bring to the sales table? While you want to measure your opens, clicks, bounce rates, etc., it has to ultimately start and stop with the marketing’s contribution to revenue.

The three things Carlos Hidalgo recommends to someone getting started with lead management include:

1. Conducting an audit. Where are you today as an organization? Regardless of what you think, your organization might have some good processes in place. Go though your lead management steps and determine where you are with you data, lead planning, metrics, etc. Figure out what the quickest wins will be.
2. Figuring out (with sales) the definitions of each buying cycle. Figure out between marketing and sales definitions such as a marketing qualified lead. Create these definitions and then you can put together a qualification model.
3. Doing some kind of lead nurturing. The statistics from MarketingSherpa include that 50% of buyers aren’t in a buying mode when they first engage, so lead nurturing is a must.

To learn more, watch the video below.