Every CEO needs to demand return on marketing investment. And every marketer needs to obtain executive commitment to a well-developed prospect development program in order to keep the ROI promise and ensure that return. It’s this prospect development program that drives the long-term process to effectively produce inquiries and suspects, turn them into prospects, and then into qualified prospects who then get turned over to the sales department.
I’ve seen many instances where a prospect development program works correctly: the top sales and marketing executives together, side by side, right there in every planning and decision meeting. Sometimes this requires a business culture change, but when the benefits are explained and the change made, it always works.
Marketing and sales must both agree that the prospecting development program is a process they want to implement; they both buy into it. They agree that the marketing team will generate, cultivate, nurture, and qualify prospects to the level that the sales team wishes. They then agree that sales will receive only these latter, qualified prospects to close. That’s sales’ specialty: closing sales. Finally, marketing and sales agree on the priority markets and describe in detail whom they are going after.
These decisions in hand, they create a new business development plan, strategy, and tactics, making sure the generation program for each marketing channel is focused on this target audience and on a recipe for prospect nurturing and qualification.
Permanent funding and consistency
Permanent funding is the most important reason for executive commitment. Without permanent funding, a long-term process and the resulting revenue consistency cannot follow. And consistency is key to avoiding peaks and valleys in your sales performance. Successfully committed companies prefer to rely on a continuous results process to keep a flow of prospects coming in year-round.
Whether your prospect generation programs are conducted internally or outsourced, keep in mind that like sales, prospecting is forever. Therefore you need permanent funding to maintain
• databases
• market awareness
• the actual process
• continual market demand
• consistent flow of qualified prospects to sales.
To justify and support the permanent funding, there must be measurement. You need to know where every prospect comes from and where every sale comes from. You need to know how the inquiry developed and from which marketing program it came: print advertising, e-marketing, Webinars, trade shows, etc. This accountability shows you what’s working and what isn’t. It’s the payoff that allows you to show executives true return on their marketing investment and encourages executive commitment to stay the course.
Two mistakes to avoid
Marketers who approach prospecting as separate programs or campaigns are the ones who experience peaks-and-valleys, start-and-stop sales results. They get hung up on individually justifying each prospecting activity and dealing with funding cuts when budgets tighten. In his book “Sales and Marketing 365,” Jim Obermayer notes: “Track sales ‘slumps’ and you can be certain they track back to a lapse in marketing and prospecting.’
A start-and-stop approach ends up resulting in higher costs per lead and per sale. And of course, it does not support predictable growth in sales—and it is this predictable growth that helps maintain executive commitment.
Viewing prospecting efforts on a campaign-by-campaign basis, rather than holistically, is one major mistake to avoid. Another is in the form of a misapplication of human resources. You see it where there’s little ongoing follow-up and little, if any, nurturing. You might catch it in the form of highly paid account representatives—your relationship builders and sales closers–following up (or possibly not following up) on Web inquiries, 800-number calls, or trade-show bingo cards.
These account reps should not be cold callers. The reality is that they will not consistently do the ongoing follow-up required to get a true return on marketing dollars spent. Instead you’ll see higher cost per sales, representatives who are less focused on specific revenue-generating activities, a low percentage of conversion, wasted resources, and low morale. Worst of all, it ensures no real measurable return on marketing investment, so no executive commitment.
The good news is, if you heed the above advice, you’ll create a highly functional prospecting development process that will become self-reinforcing and make justification on the part of executives no-brainer. Your executives will remain committed to your process, your motivated sales team will thank you, and your revenue will grow.
Barry Lieberman is president of Advantage Plus Marketing Group (www.apmg.com), a Tustin, CA-based provider of prospecting services.
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