I am sure we all have heard the comment, "Sales don't follow up on all the leads sent by Marketing". There are multiple dimensions to this problem. Some of the typical reasons we hear are: The leads are not of high quality, the leads have not been properly qualified etc. Outside of the lead quality issues there are a few tactical system related issues that result in significant leakage too. One such reason is Marketing systems not respecting routing rules setup in Sales systems. For example, geo/territory based routing is a typical process used in sales systems like salesforce.com. Some of the sample rules are:
a. If country in "United states, US, USA, United States of America" and state in "California, CA" route the lead to Bob.
b. If country in "United states, US, USA, United States
of America" and state in "Texas, TX" route the lead
to John.
Interestingly, if we look at the lead capture processes like web response forms, events, trade shows, webinars etc. these rules are not enforced all the time. Let me take one channel - web forms. Here are some basic questions:
1. Do all web response forms collect geo information (contact us forms, product eval forms, white paper download forms among others)?
2. Are these questions mandatory on all the forms?
3. Do the values set in the forms map to the values in the sales system?
We will be surprised that many marketing systems don't respect these basic rules. For example, a white paper download form might make email mandatory but geo information optional. What happens in this case? We might get a record with the following information:
First Name: Tim
Last Name: Symonds
Email: tim@acme.com
Company: acme
Whitepaper Download: Acme's path breaking solution and value justification
When this lead is published to an SFA system like salesforce.com who gets this lead? In most cases quite a few leads end up in a wrong queue or get assigned to an admin queue and the hope is that the admin diligently routes the leads to the right rep. More often than not, the lead stays in the queue or is sent to the rep too late.
How can we fix this problem? One option is to capture key routing based information up front. Infoblox (www.infoblox.com), a utility- grade Core Network services company has an interesting solution to this problem. They have designed an interaction model that collects information from Leads over multiple interactions. If you visit their Resource Center and download a white paper or watch a pre-recorded webinar you will experience this model. Here is a high level overview of what is collected:
Interaction 1: Name, email, company, geo-region information.
Interaction 2: Industry, Job Role, Job Level
Interaction 3: Solution area of interest, Current solutions
Interaction 4: Project timeframe, Project budget
With this model the system captures basic demographic information and geo information in the first interaction. With this model the Lead is asked for minimal information increasing the overall form completion rates and also ensuring proper routing in the SFA system.
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