B2B Marketing

A few years ago I had a series of golf lessons and remember the instructor teaching me to do the exact reverse of what my intuition was telling me. Rather than attack at the ball as hard as I could he told me to loosen up and concentrate on the swing. It felt strange at first but the advice paid dividends as my accuracy and range improved significantly.

I witnessed a similar counter intuitive episode when working closely with the VP EMEA sales for a leading Enterprise technology vendor and learned something invaluable from him that I believe holds true for many sales and marketing teams in B2B arena. That is ‘to qualify' out early those leads that are unlikely to convert into revenue. It of course sounds obvious when you read that sentence on this blog but it is surprising to see how many organisations have poor lead qualification and scoring procedures and as a result have sales pipelines that will do little to help them achieve or exceed their revenue targets because they are filled more with quantity than quality. The missed quota achievement metric is just one symptom but there are other equally problematic symptoms that lie underneath the surface because they might not necessarily be directly measured, such as the costs of engaging with a target that is unlikely to become a customer and also the negative effect of being unable to plan a business because the variances between forecast and actual are too great.

The VP in question took a tough decision as he recognised that his sales team were working exceptionally hard but no so smart. He identified some criteria against which each lead was to be scored. If it didn't meet the criteria it would not pass across as an identified opportunity into the sales pipeline and sales teams were not to focus their attention on them. He would conduct regular team reviews of the pipeline to ensure there was no slippage against the desired objective - a sales pipeline of quality.

The leads that were not qualified as opportunities were passed to a lead nurturing ‘keep informed' pot and continually messaged to with a continuum of campaigns designed to educate and inform and the behaviours of that audience tracked in a unified CRM system, so that if and when any of the opportunities did become closer matched they could be reconsidered. The point here was not to focus resources and expensive sales time on leads that would not convert - at least within a set period of time and push them into a nurturing system that was efficient and cost effective where we could message according to their particular stage in the buy cycle which was more around educating on the need.

At first, this was a really hard pill to swallow for the sales team but I am guessing that the VP of EMEA sales must have had some golf lessons and realised that sometimes the counter intuitive approach might just allow you to improve your game.