CEO’s don’t care about leads. They don’t care about databases. They don’t care about content. They don’t care about social media. They don’t care about cost per lead. They don’t care about marketing ROI (mostly because they can’t track it). They care about revenue.
As a result, mayhem is the best word to use to describe the relationship between marketing and sales. Heard that before, I know… read on!
Between now and the end of the year we will publish the “Five Reasons CEO’s Should Care About Leads” (and databases, content, social media, cost per lead and marketing ROI) and how to fix what is broken.
Reason #1: DATA
Nothing makes a CEO yawn more quickly than a discussion about databases. Yet the value of data is undeniable. The problem is that it’s often the little data, and not “Big Data, killing your company’s return on investments.
“Big Data” is sexy. It’s the buzz. And, there are some remarkable “Big Data” successes in every industry including medical treatment in hospitals. At the same time, it’s little data mistakes that are racking up significant expense with little return.
As the CEO, did you know that you are routinely throwing away 95% of the value of your marketing investments? That is because your company has no process in place to leverage the value of near term, latent or even non-responsive potential opportunities. The rest of the value is squandered once so-called leads are sent to sales and ignored. Leads are thrown over the fence (either wholesale or based on some inaccurate scoring mechanism created by a black box) to sales and then mostly enter a black hole.
The truth is that you know your process is broken (it must be, because how could so much activity result in so little incremental revenue)… you are just not entirely sure what to do about it. What to do about it is this:
- Look at your CRM as an asset. Each prospect in the database should be validated and then a lifetime value should be assigned to each prospect. One of our clients built over $200,000,000 in pipeline by reducing the size of their prospect universe to 1,200 companies then aligned and integrated sales and marketing.
- Find out what is happening to the other 95% of responses to marketing initiatives. See the free whitepaper “Mind the Gap” for more information.
- Assign a multi-role “judicial branch” to evaluate every lead that does not progress from marketing qualified to sales qualified and closed.
Read the 2nd reason CEOs should care about leads: “Metrics That Matter: That You Are Missing”.