Sales Accountability to Marketing - Myth vs. Reality

One of the discussion points in the "Sales and Marketing alignment" topic is the Service Level Agreement (SLA) between Marketing and Sales for the Leads generated by Marketing. Clarity and monitoring of this SLA is critical because it drives one of the key metrics that we want to measure in Marketing - Conversion rate from Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) to Sales Accepted Leads (SAL).

A typical SLA could be:

• Sales needs to follow up on all A Leads within one business day or 8 business hours.
• Sales needs to follow up on all B Leads within two business days or 16 business hours.
• Sales can (optionally) follow up on C Leads within a week of receiving them.

Now, let's look at how this process can be implemented and automated using Marketing Automation solutions (like Market2Lead) and Sales Force Automation solutions (like Salesforce.com). One of the key fields on the Lead object in Salesforce.com that can be used to track sales feedback on Leads is Lead Status. A sample set of values for Lead Status are:

• New: Status when a Lead is first published into the sales process.
• Attempting to Contact: Status when sales initiates follow-up on the Leads. Based on the SLA times this is one of the immediate next states that a Lead needs to be moved to.
• Invalid Information: Status when sales determines that the contact information is invalid and the Lead cannot be reached.
• Contacted: Status when a sales person successfully contacted the Individual (either by phone or by email).
• Not a Lead: After initial Contact the sales person determines that the Prospect is not looking for a solution for his business problem in the foreseeable future or if there is no fit between what the sales person is selling and what the Lead is looking for.
• Demo Request: One logical next step (in high tech especially) is either a demo request or a follow up meeting.

   

Now, from an SLA standpoint, a Marketing Automation solution needs to be able to track 2 metrics:

1. Transition of a Lead from New state to either Attempting to Contact, Invalid Information or Contacted state.
2. Time taken for the Lead Status to change from New to any of the stages mentioned in the previous point.

If these two metrics can be measured and tracked, Marketing users can automate measurement of:

1. Conversion rate from Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Accepted Leads (SAL). This can be done by comparing state changes from New to Attempting to Contact or Contacted.
2. SLA compliance by Sales. Marketing managers can compute the Average Time for sales follow up by Lead Score by computing the time taken for a change in status of a Lead from New to any of the states mentioned in the previous point.

I welcome comments and suggestions on this topic.