I enjoyed the conversation yesterday on Jep Castelein's blog on demand generation, wherein several of us debated the issues with labeling marketing automation systems as just "lead management" systems as some analysts are wont to do. It begs the question, what is a lead?
For many of us a lead is a person who may or may not represent an opportunity and who may or may not be deemed qualified during some future vetting process. As such this person is considered unique, and deduped in the marketing database, probably on the basis of their email address or some combo of last name,address etc.
On the other hand there are those firms out there who feel that a lead is an early glimmer of an opportunity for a specific product or service. As a result a single person, who may even be an existing customer, could be in your system multiple times as multiple leads for multiple products. Now I can see that this approach is a very sales driven approach. They want to believe that every human contact has immediate dollar signs behind it. Even the SFA systems, salesforce.com and MS CRM will permit multiple copies of the same person (based on email). There is a horrible downside (IMHO) to this approach - lots of dupes in the system - just whom are we marketing to? How do you track and ensure canspam compliance? Many of the marketing automation vendors won't allow you to have the same email in their system twice. Does anyone know of an upside to thinking of leads as imminent opportunities - it would be great to hear from you.
-Kevin
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