Jay Leonard
A few weeks ago, at the Sales 2.0 conference, I noticed a trend: salespeople are generating their own leads. In fact, I heard pundit after pundit offer justifications for salespeople to be more proactive and take lead generation into their own hands, including statistics showing that as few as 30% of the leads sent to sales by marketing are worthy of pursuit.
Isn’t it marketing’s job to deliver qualified (or at least pursuit worthy) leads to sales? So has marketing failed?
Well, no, not exactly. There are two significant (you might call them disruptive) trends happening at the same time in lead generation: the individualization of technology and social selling.
Marketing is less well equipped than sales to take advantage of these. Sales, especially the individual salesperson, is far better equipped to experiment with new methods, processes, and technologies than any marketing department can be, if only because of the scale. And marketing has significant responsibilities beyond lead generation, including leading and developing the company’s relationship with prospects, customers, and all other stakeholders and stewarding the company’s brand.
But in order to be successful, marketing will have to watch these trends—and how salespeople take advantage of them—and figure out how to make them part of everyday marketing in order to stay relevant.
Trend One: The Individualization of Technology
Technology has migrated from huge systems only practical for large institutions to apps any individual can use anywhere, anytime. In the same way, systems which large corporations use to manage their resources are now available for individuals, including cloud based (SaaS) services such as CRM and marketing automation.
Companies such as Nimble and Contractually provide cloud based services that are designed for (and priced for) individual salespeople to do the essential parts of what a more cumbersome CRM system once did. They manage everything from contacts to social relationships to follow-ups to engagement opportunities.
What is important about this is these services can be used by an individual salesperson to find opportunities and generate leads entirely on his or her own, even while working within a larger corporate CRM system.
In fact, my friend Matt Heinz offered a wealth of tips and tricks (he calls them “sales hacks”) for individual salespeople to use as a range of tools to create a robust lead flow—all independent of any marketing department (yes, this works very well for sole proprietors, too!).
Trend Two: Social Selling
Social selling means salespeople can use their social networks and the activity they generate to find prospects and identify buying signals. For example, if I were selling marketing automation software, and a 2nd degree LinkedIn connection just took a new job as CMO (a possible buying signal) for a company in my market, I would want to contact that person. I might find that out through the activity generated in my own social network and then find out more about that person through their own social and other activity. I would then have a connection that can introduce me and would also know how to approach my newly discovered prospect.
Notice I am not looking in my CRM system for a lead that has not been touched in a while nor am I looking for an introduction from my management. Salespeople (presumably) have their own networks they can use to find the connections they want and need.
Services such as TwitHawk and Newsle offer this kind of social signal search service, and Nimble and Contactually integrate it into the activity stream.
When you put all this together, you have a powerful new source of very well-qualified leads for the salesperson to pursue.
So Where Is Marketing?
Marketing departments have done a very good job of adapting to the world of on-line and social media, and they have found ways to successfully get the word out. Marketing departments have also become very good at doing this on a large scale, just as they became very good at large scale communication in traditional media.
But even the most targeted integrated email and social media campaigns reach thousands—sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands—of people in the hope that a small percentage will be sufficiently interested to become leads and prospects.
Salespeople are looking at this from the other direction. They are ignoring the scale of reaching mass markets and large target audiences, and instead, using the power of atomized technology and social media combined to find the proverbial needle-in-the-haystack—who they are pretty sure is an interested prospect.
Can Marketing Adapt?
Should marketing change its approach and focus on finding individuals? No. Well, maybe.
Marketing must look after its whole scope of responsibilities and ensure there are strong relationships with customers, prospects, and other stakeholders. Marketing must also continue to use its ability to scale communications to ensure large audiences are reached.
In fact, without doing this first, the salesperson may never have the chance to find that one interested prospect.
But marketers must also become proficient in a world that has become individualized. This individualization has happened not only in how sales leads are found but also in how relationships and brand preferences are developed. Marketers must be able to take all the activities where they focus on the mass market and find ways to translate or evolve them into individual relationships.
It’s easy for individual salespeople to experiment with new methods and technologies, and they are finding some of them very useful. Marketers must find ways to experiment with new methods, processes, and technologies to find the ones that work in this changing world.
The challenge marketers face is learning how to scale this individualization to reach the mass audience so the company can scale its individual relationships.
And marketing can deliver more relevant leads.
Join the conversation: post a comment telling us how you are addressing this issue.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Good post; Timely summarization of what we’re seeing w/customers of Nimble. It is very much an open question whether marketers can SUCCESSFULLY scale individualization to a mass audience. These ideas are logically opposed. That said, the path to pursue is one of expertise, affinity and getting to Why? so, as you say, the company can scale its individual relationships.
Marketing AND Sales both pursue these 3 traits: Expertise in a given subject area is a natural attractant– curiosity in any industry is rewarded with success. Affinity combines the like-minded in a natural state of connection around area(s) of commonality. Finally, the purpose behind why we do what we do becomes an important part of authenticity around a brand / Co. and inspires people who believe what we believe to become part of a bigger movement… largely for themselves.
Very good post and so very true. Having sales cold call for leads is an antiqued and obsolete approach. A CMO once said to me “Marketing looks for Mr. Right and Sales looks for Mr. Right Now.” This means, by definition, that sales is poorly equipped to do long term and broad activities. I wrote a similar post entitled “Why every company needs a VP of Marketing or CMO” http://bit.ly/11PfQk0
Thanks for the nice post.
Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor
Host of Marketing Made Simple TV
Great article about a sensitive topic (marketing & sales alignment) and the rise of sales productivity tools and social selling techniques.
My own thoughts are that there are two roles that can make a greater contribution in the sales 2.0 and buyer-led business.
1. Product Management – including topics like productizing knowledge, content creation & management, initiating customer communities to encourage adoption and benefits realisation, and not just a more engineering centric approach to version control etc.
2. Inside Sales – a layer between marketing (communications) and field sales, or website fulfillment once the buying decision has been made. The link goes to further thoughts on this.
New tools like Nimble CRM help new methodologies to become a reality, where there is a desire to change.
Thank you all for the commentary – this is a challenging issue, and I will be writing more about it, and how companies are addressing it.
Eric raises an interesting question about scaling personalization. One thing I’ve noticed is that we have automated business function-by-function (manufacturing and finance came first, for example). Each time we have, we have reached a point where we were able to customize the output on a mass scale (e.g. manufactured products can now be customized as they move down the assembly line, and not every item that comes off the line is identical).
We are now automating marketing and sales. While we have a long way to go, we also know that the end goal of the marketing and sales process is a relationship with a customer that includes exchange of value. So I have to wonder: will we reach a point where we can automate the process enough so that we can get to a point of mass customization? if so, what does that mean?
I also think Jeff’s comment factors in – marketing is very good at finding the right profile, but one of the biggest issues in the premise is that the “leads” with the right profile may not be ready to buy. Discovering readiness to buy is traditionally sales’ job. Will that change? can it? does mass customization of the process necessitate it?
And to Mark’s point, I’ve done a lot of work with Reality Works Group (http://www.realityworksgroup.com), and their CEO (@AnnekeSeley) brought a similar idea to light: that the link that makes the value of the lead possible is the inside sales rep, and that marketing is doing the right things, but the filter (and hard work) happens at inside sales. That might be the point at which this technology enables mass customization.
What do you think? Is there anyone you know who is doing this well? or better than average?
Jeff,
This is a good thought provoking article. I don’t think we (marketing professionals) have failed sales. I do think marketing and specifically lead generation has evolved. (and where marketing fails sales is where marketing does not evolve). Marketing has and always will provide overall aircover. Getting a sales ready lead in the hands of a sales person is an art. And it also is about timing. There are many touch points in the relationship between a “prospect” and the company. A lead (other than mickey mouse or the “student researching for a paper”) may not be sales ready today but that does not mean its not a good lead. Once you have the lead in the funnel, it needs to be nurtured. There is no point is spending lots of money getting a lead, but little money in nurturing the lead. Managing the marketing funnel is a science as much as it is an art.
But I do agree that good sales people always have done (some of) their own hunting. That’s what people relationships are all about. That’s why having a good social 360 degree view of your network is very important. Marketing cannot see when somebody changes job or gets a promotion or tells linkedin, twitter or facebook that they are embarking on a new project. That remains the domain of the individual sales rep.
Jan: Thank you! I appreciate your thoughts and kind words.
I’ve heard a number of views on this, and there are at least two points that are coming up: One says that marketing needs to gather and process the “social selling” information around the lead and include that in lead scoring and the handoff to sales.
The other says that marketing is more about who might buy, and sales is about when – making the difference here one of “readiness to buy” which can be determined in a number of ways, both social and direct.
Which leads me to ask: Can marketing determine readiness to buy and include that in the lead passed to sales? And will that make a sales rep more likely to follow up?