Just when you think the business world is changing for the better, that marketing and sales professionals are starting to “get it,” that a new age of enlightened prospecting is on its way, based on serving the customer and truly providing strategic value to them, rather than just pushing product . . . you have a meeting like the one I sat in on last week.

Well, to be honest, calling it a “meeting” is a bit disingenuous; a live-action comedy of marketing errors is a bit nearer the mark.

I can’t reveal names or the organization involved, because it would be a blow-up embarrassment for them. But let’s just take you through
the last bit of our collective conversation . . .

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On a recent guest post at the Bridge Group’s blog, author Henry Bruce brings up some research by Marketing Sherpa that states that 75% of all sales leads generated are going to buy at some point in the next 18-24 months.

Think about that for a minute.

A. Only 1 in 4 leads is ever totally non-productive. They may not convert now, or in the time frame the rep wants, but contrary to popular belief, it’s relatively rare for a sales lead to be total garbage. 75% of the active leads in our CRM systems RIGHT NOW are going to buy a product or service in our sector from somebody, somewhere in the next two years. So why not from you/me/us, if we’re the right fit?

B. It also seems to indicate that the need to intelligently score leads is now more critical than ever to prevent waste. 18-24 months is a long time, and no sales rep in their right mind is going to try and keep a prospect “on the hook” for a year-and-a-half. If they’re not buying now, stop wasting effort, the thought process goes, and use a long-term lead nurturing strategy . . . .

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Saw a link to a Harvard Business Review article this morning on Twitter (thanks @abneedles) that had something interesting to say about the “sales funnel.” “A global consumer electronics company embarked on a CDJ [Consumer Decision Journey] analysis after research revealed that although consumers were highly familiar with the brand, they tended to drop it…

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“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.” -Marshall McLuhan

New Year’s Eve, 2010, will mark 30-year anniversary of the passing away of someone you’ve probably never heard of, a scholar by the name of Marshall McLuhan.

Many academics consider McLuhan, a Canadian who taught the majority of his life at the University of Toronto, to be one of the foremost pioneers in the study of media and communications, and the effects of media technologies on the social and cultural makeup of society.

The concept of “the global village”—an always-on, totally connected society, linked by electricity and wires to move information—was first posited by Marshall McLuhan in 1961, 30+ years before the public Internet and World Wide Web would make his vision a reality . . . .

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If by some serendipitous circumstance you were allowed to hang out at the XANT offices for day, you’d discover pretty quickly that we are passionate about the power of immediate lead response. We help businesses get better sales intelligence, and effectively manage their sales and lead generation processes in a lot of ways. But we…

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As the founder of top-level consultancy High-Yield Methods in Minneapolis, Dick Lee has worked as a sales and customer process guru for over three decades, doing VP- and C-level consulting with companies like Boeing, 3M, and Microsoft.

In an outstanding article entitled “Sales Lead Programs—Another Inconvenient Truth,” Dick tears apart bad lead management practices with a metaphorical sledgehammer, but in the process brings up a just-as-critical side effect: “We now have and have had innumerable clients dying to hire good, experienced salespeople, but the well has about run dry.”

Sales people get paid a lot of money, and perform “hard, essential work,” but in Dick’s mind are often treated as “Joy Riders. Parasites. Necessary Evils.” Sales is the “corporate whipping boy,” he states, because “anyone having that much fun deserves to be punished, eh?” If the well is running dry, it’s because professional sales reps are “treated so badly that most up-and-coming business professionals won’t put up with those levels of disrespect . . . . “

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If you’ve followed my blog or my company for any length of time, it’s likely you’ve heard me say that immediate response to sales leads is one of the crucial factors for creating new sales prospects (and that a good sales automation tool is about the only way to do it consistently and effectively). But…

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Though published back in 2002, author John Warrilow’s book Drilling For Gold presents a fascinating take on the tried and true (some might say cliché) “80/20” rule of sales and marketing—namely, that when it comes to small business selling, the rule should closer to 98/2.

Using a chart that breaks down accounts and prospects into a series of “buckets,” he demonstrates a process for evaluating the current profit levels of customers and prospects, and each account’s potential growth.

smb-eval-chart

While Warrilow states that good qualitative research should back up the basic “Profit/Potential” profile, generally speaking the trick is to expend the highest levels of time, energy, and money not with the top 20 percent, but the top 2 percent of clients and prospects—the ones who are currently highly profitable, and have a high potential to remain so.

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leads-3d-graph-smAt some point, every sales manager on the planet has heard a sales rep gripe about how and when they’re getting their leads.

“Who’s deciding this?”

“Why aren’t I getting more leads?”

“Why aren’t I getting more leads from industry X / hot leads / leads for large accounts?”

Most companies struggle to find and keep a consistent stream of good, warm leads, and handing out a fresh, qualified lead can almost feel like an event in and of itself—but that doesn’t mean a rep asking these questions is out of line.

However the decision is made, the fact is that lead distribution is a selection process. Somewhere along the way, someone is making a decision about how leads are being handed out. Even if the decision is totally random / ad hoc, that’s still a decision . . . .

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