OUTSIDE-IN MARKETING: Part 4 of 4

Part 1 examined the mission, strategies and objectives of an Outside-in Marketing plan, Part 2 looked at getting to know your market, and Part 3 highlighted brand building and communications. Part 4 wraps up the series with a look at filling and managing the sales pipeline.

Part 4: Lead-Generation & Management

Best practices for filling the sales pipeline differ when you have a few big customers compared to many small ones. Demand generation strategies frequently fail to comprehend the different approaches required—each customer in a high-consideration/low-volume segment requires far more qualification than each mainstream customer in a commodity market.

That aspect of “volume economics” will help you optimize three fundamentals of customer engagement and lead management:

Pipeline Strategy: Acquiring new customers or managing key accounts?

Lead generation efforts by the marketing team can be unnecessary and even counter-productive for a steady-state, profitable business where key accounts make big, recurring purchases, and new competitors rarely enter the picture. But a market with numerous customers buying less expensive, less complex products or services requires scalable marketing programs to generate, qualify, and manage the volume of sales leads.

Lead Definition: What qualifies a lead for sales follow-up?

When you need many new customers, lead scoring can accelerate higher-quality pipeline growth. Qualifying criteria such as budget, authority, need and time-frame (BANT) drive many scoring systems, and online analytics can reveal behavioral profiles. The greater your customer volume, the more you need scalable, online channels and behavioral lead-scoring.

Rules of Engagement: Who contacts customers, and when?

In the low-volume, high-price extreme, account managers must build customer relationships, loyalty, and repeat business with face-to-face interaction. Marketing teams support the process with sales collateral, event management, and service expertise. But in the high-volume, low-price extreme, marketing teams drive new customer growth with direct-response advertising, direct-relationship marketing, and lead management, and they assign qualified leads to the appropriate sales channels.

The Buying Cycle

If your situation involves a relatively high volume of new customers, you’ll need to actively manage them through the buying cycle. As you do that, your prospects will move through the following phases:

Targets are those whom you’d like to get into your buying cycle. Lists are available from media advertising representatives and other sources. You want to make targets aware of your solution.

Inquiries respond to your ads, trade show exhibits, or other communications. They’re aware of you, and now you want to grow their interest.

Leads show enough interest for you to follow-up—you want to make them strongly consider buying from you.

Opportunities are considering a purchase, and you have enough confidence to forecast a potential deal. Now you want to create clear preference over competing alternatives.

Customers/Bookings are opportunities that closed in your favor, and now you want to maintain and strengthen their commitment to your solution.

Strategic Accounts are current customers who also offer great opportunities down the road. You want to build their loyalty.

As you build brand equity, you can generate more high-quality sales leads. Use the following process to separate the wheat from the chaff:

1. Make a promotional offer to your target market
2. Capture & score small amounts of qualifying information from the inquiries
3. Fulfill the response, including an embedded next-level offer
4. Repeat the process with escalating offers until the prospect is ready for hand-off to Sales

Marketing casts the net with lead-generating marketing communications. Responses are scored and leads are handed off to sales for one-on-one engagement and closure. A closed-loop feedback process between sales and marketing teams facilitates continuous improvement.

There are many tools and services available to help you. For example, online content syndication networks can take your video clips, white papers, info-graphics and blogs to self-identified members of your target market, and marketing automation software and services from 3rd party vendors can help you generate and manage leads.

But before you invest in the tools, map out what you’ll automate, and then develop the marketing content to drive the processes. Once your lead generation and management is manually effective at a small volume, automation will help you scale-up.

Was this 4-part series useful to you? Please let me know.