Marketers can no longer sit back and “buy attention” through mass media and then rely on professional salespeople to step in to guide buyers from discovery call through close. Engaging the changed buyer requires new insight. Search is the new sales person. “The buyer searching for information must be educated. Perceptions must change. Objections must be overcome. And decisions coordinated.” (Peter Drucker) Today marketers are tracking rapid changes in social media and search marketing, and the decreasing relevance of print and mass media. The underlying trend to this is simply access to information. Previously Quality filters and the economics of information were commonly controlled by businesses like publishing companies. They controlled and edited content that deserved to be edited based on quality filters, or they edited content that was paid for (like a newspaper advertisement with The Wall Street Journal).

In a dramatic return to scale – Modern filtration and quality check is done by the people. People make information accessible by liking it, sharing it, and SEO uses social filters to deem if information is valuable, or qualified to be delivered to the masses by achieving a high-ranking. The economics of filtering and publishing quality content have changed.

In the old publishing world marketing almost exclusively delivered branding, or high level awareness, but there was no way to pinpoint buyers that were beginning to move in the sales process.This consistently created a gap in the sales and marketing processes. To overcome this gap marketing must now create high-ranking content in our new social filtering system to effectively engage their audience. This social influence is continuing to evolve – previously you had to write good content to reach your target audience, now you have to write good content and then track and measure your audiences interactions and ‘digital body language’.

Success can only come by embracing this trend, which means engaging and guiding todays buyer in new ways that reflect the new realities of information access, and that, in turn, rely on understanding each buyer. If we understand our buyers unique needs then we can tailor content that will efficiently drive and educate them through all stages of the buying process.

Many early-stage sales engagements happen almost exclusively online today sales and marketing executives who understand and plan for this will increase revenue. Buyers do not need a sales rep until they are further along in the discovery phase. These buyers are researching online, receiving and forwarding emails. These online behaviors can give us important clues about each buyers interests and inclination towards a certain product, or service. Each page visited carries an indication of interest, each email that is opened, or clicked indicates a response to a certain message. Each keyword, or phrase used in a search engine is indicative of hidden questions, or interests. Every email that is opened, clicked, or otherwise interacted with shows a certain response to each and every individual message. Each visit, or interaction with social media can also be used as a prompt, or give insight into each buyers mindset. The Online body language of buyers can be collected, sorted and analyzed to derive a wealth of information about a prospective buyer.

It can give clues as to area of interest, stage of process, objections and barriers to entry. This online body language gives marketers the knowledge and insight needed to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. To get this data it is important to have five elements in your revenue creation process.

1. Discoverable Information: Marketers need to make their message, or information discoverable by buyers. This information must be given at that right time and in the right media channel to attract the buyers attention.
2. Understand Buyers Stage: The best sales professionals focus on understanding where ea. buyer is in the buying process. This information can be found, analyzed and discovered by careful observation of the buyers online body language.
3. Coordinated Efforts: Sales and Marketing must bridge their gap and act as  a team to generate the insight and efficiency alluded to in this post.
4. Clean Data: clean data is like oil, or gasoline to the fire it must be clean and available for ea. initiative to take off. The data must be qualified, consistent and complete.
5. Actionable Analysis: This must drive action. Revenue performance can only be managed if you correctly analyze and allocate investments towards the efficient and consistent results.

Following these steps and strategically investing resources and time into the right buyer with the right message will shorten your sales cycle. Marketing and Sales can increase their relevance by continually forecasting, anticipating and guiding revenue many months and quarters in advance with great precision.

Cost per lead kills companies because there is a very basic conflict of interest: One department sets quantity standards, while another department sets the budget and another group is responsible for implementing the budget and driving potential prospects in the door. This lead generation group has the responsibility to meet the quota set for quantity of leads generated. They can generate that number, but must sacrifice quality. If they generate the right number of leads they did their job and get the bonus. However, if that same group decides to focus on quality and not quantity they might generate fewer leads, but cause more bottom line revenue, yet they do not receive any reward.

The fallacy of measuring the success of a lead generation campaign solely based on CPL is seen in the relative in elasticity of Cost Per Acquisition across industries. There is an expected wage for a good farmer, or sales executive and you just won’t be able to lower that wage to a point that will allow for the CPL to go below the average in this relatively efficient market. The other option to reduce CPL is to generate more leads per sales person and again this is a relatively inelastic number. Sales cannot make 175 calls per day, rather 100 is a great benchmark. Lead generate firms can no more overcharge companies for their services than they can decrease the CPL associated with their clients industry.

What can you do to effectively price the value of a lead? Know the Numbers:

1. Find the cost of what the campaign would be. $50,000 = 20,000 direct mail pieces, or will invite 21,000 individuals to a webinar.
2. Being generous we will assume a 1% response yielding 200-210 interested prospects.
3. Alternatively you could execute a multi-touch, multi-media, multi-cycle campaign for the same budget against 1,000 highly qualified suspect companies.
4. A good rule of thumb is to assume that 5% of your addressable audience will have an actionable interest in your offer. Applying this percentage and we yield 10, 10.5 and 50 short term leads, respectively.
5. The following costs per short-term qualified lead results: direct mail ($5K), webinar ($4,762) and multi-touch, multi-media, multi-cycle campaign ($1K)

These cost assumptions are consistently conservative, if you don’t believe me please calculate the real cost per qualified lead for your business and you will be surprised.

Calculate and agree on an acceptable cost per qualified lead and do not accept cost per response as a substitute. Only the cost per qualified lead will give you a clear picture of your return on each program. Basing decisions based on cost per response versus cost per qualified lead will result in cascading inefficiencies along the sales supply chain. Finally – hold sales accountable to every lead and add every lead to the forecast and take no lead off of the forecast without sales management approval. So How Much Should A Lead Cost? Answer: More than you think, but probably a lot less than what you are paying.

Lead management really comes down to the basics. In this post we outline how to approach common problems in bridging the gap between your sales and marketing departments.

Symptoms of a Lead Quality Problem:

1. Leads are delivered to sales with little, if any, specific lead-by-lead feedback.
2. Marketing’s objective defaults to quantity and CPL because there is no other way to measure, nor report return.
3. Forecasts are consistently inaccurate.

The problem isn’t recognizing these common problems, but rather fixing them. The common denominator to all three is sales. Sales reps consistently do not value marketing leads. Sales reps do what you pay them to do – so basic changes in forecasting in relation to compensation are always required if you want to tighten up the process. Once reps recognize that leads generated thoughtfully using a multi-cycle, multi-touch, multi-media approach are more valuable we suggest that you put these leads directly on your forecast with a 10%  confidence factor at the average selling price. Taking a lead off of the forecast should take a level of consideration by senior management. This is the only process to put teeth into the forecast and demand creation process.

To help in the process it is necessary to audit ea. lead and to report back to sales and marketing on the effectiveness of lead follow up. Reports generated from this auditing are some of the most effective tools your company will ever receive from sales and marketing.

To conclude – there are a lot of reasons why there are gaps between marketing and sales. None is more costly to your company than spending money on “leads” that are not really good prospects, or creating good leads that are just not followed up on.

Media is defined as how you approach your target market. It closely relates to the market that you have segmented, targeted and qualified. It encompasses frequency, media channels, reach, calendar, audiences, creative and active reporting. Enough contact and content to engage, but enough space to respect the space and demands on a busy business prospect. The trick is to balance the type of contacts by using great timing and unique and differing types of outreach.

Mixed media programs that use outbound calling, email, voice mail, and direct mail that are optimally scheduled for the greatest effect will generate the greatest return on your marketing dollars.

Multi-cycle and mixed media optimize response. Historically database marketers have found that following up on a campaign even one time increases chances of conversion by 6-8 times what it was. What gets left out here is that a true multi-cycle campaign will touch prospects between 8-30 times to truly cultivate the opportunity. Touching existing cold leads generated from a previous campaign is often more effective that moving from one big marketing campaign to the next. It is important to vary the mediums by which you convey value and it is also important to do so numerous times to optimize your sales and to keep your marketing dollars earning a reasonable ROI.