A Call Plan Can Help To Fix The Gap Between Sales and Marketing
I just finished reading a great article from Josh Stailey with The Pursuit Group regarding how to best deliver “sales- ready- leads”.
http://www.imakenews.com/thepursuitgroup/e_article001828768.cfm?x=bhcrTyc,b26bn4tC
He touches on the misaligned expectations that exist between marketing and sales (my favorite topic) and how it results in limited attention being paid to those early-stage opps. As a result, most of them run the risk of falling through the cracks. Josh makes some excellent suggestions to prevent this from happening such as leveraging technology, launching an effective inbound marketing program, along with the use of metrics to link marketing leads/programs to revenue growth. But the most important suggestion he made (in my mind anyway) was building an effective lead nurturing process and I wanted to expand a bit on this..
Josh points out that nurture process can last for months, so both marketing and sales need to have an action plan in place to stay on that prospect's radar. At AG it's simply "the call plan". While I’m a firm believer in leveraging every tool at your disposal, we’ve learned the hard way that no matter how creative you get in reaching out to your prospects, nothing beats a good ol' fashioned phone call.
The last thing we want is that gap between your sales and marketing team to become a place where sales leads go to die. To prevent this from happening I suggest start by putting a call plan in front of your inside sales team. Step one should involve following up on any inquiry (assuming it's been scrubbed in some way) within 48 hours. As we all know, the longer a lead ages it becomes less and less likely the lead will convert to an opportunity for your sales team.
Most inside sales teams recognize the importance of continual follow-up with our prospects, but what we learned over the years is that you cannot rely solely on email or solely on the phone. It requires an effective combination of the two to quickly determine if an interest exists now or down the road. The problem with using email alone is that it tends to be less personal and the prospect may feel less inclined or compelled to contact you when they are starting to evaluate. When you rely only on the phone, you'll recognize, as many do in teleprospectng, that people rarely call you back. As a result you might find yourself out of the loop on the details when let's say they are actually getting close to potentially putting out an RFI/RFP.
The theory behind our call plan is that you can't assume that your prospect will ever respond to you. A consistent and deliberate approach combining both phone and email will greatly increase the chances that you will hear back. Hey- it may not be the response you are looking for, and you may get some folks that aren't all that fond of your persistence...but at the very least it will allow you to determine if the prospect is worth pursuing further and how much nurturing may be required.