A clear lead management strategy is essential for any business who would like to have a scalable and measurable pipeline. This post walks through how to implement the basics so you don’t have to deal with untangling a Frankenstein of a data mess later on.
Every B2B marketer at some point will have to learn about lead management aka how you’ll deal with the inbound leads you generate. From how they are further nurtured, to how they are marked in your CRM or marketing automation systems, or even assigned – a lot needs to be covered.
Before diving into lead management, you should also make sure you have a demand gen strategy – to get started, check out Demand Gen 101: Questions to Ask.
In order to get to cleanly processed lead management, you’ll have to do a bit of planning as to the framework before diving into the work. Below are some questions to ask yourself and your team and some of my thoughts to those questions (having done this several times and likely many times more, this can and will likely evolve).
Who is involved?
For planning, it is generally marketing ops working in partnership with sales ops. They will plan out the processes and document everything into a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that will need to be signed between departments (your head of marketing and head of sales).
For execution, everyone in marketing and sales will likely be involved, even if it isn’t directly assigning or reviewing leads, things they do will touch how leads are managed (example: AE’s should respond to leads within a certain time frame as written in the SLA).
What are the components of a lead management plan?
Below you’ll find a list of things that need to be defined and outlined.
- Your demand gen program’s goals and objectives
- Funnel stage definitions – including MCL, MQL, SAL, SQL definitions*
- Sales accepted lead criteria
- MQL goals, often by segment (personas or regions)
- What the MQL handoff from marketing to sales looks like and assignment criteria
- The sales engagement flow
- Sales & Marketing performance metrics
- Training & maintenance plan
*See below on what these acronyms mean
Defining your demand gen program’s goals and objectives
When it comes to defining your program’s goals, you have to answer 2 things: (1) what do you want to achieve and (2) how achievable are those goals?
As mentioned in my post, Demand Gen 101: Questions to Answer, you will have to think about both long term and short term goals. For long term, what does success look like to you? Is marketing supposed to be the program that generates the most incoming pipeline? (e.g.: over 50%?).
To figure out your path to LT, take your big goals and break them down into achievable short term goals (sounds easy, but a lot of people struggle with this). Look at where you can make the most impact into bringing pipeline toward that LT goal – whether it’s increasing conversion (creating or fixing your lead nurturing) or increasing speed from inbound to handoff, there should be plenty of ways you can reach your LT goals.
Define your stages
Not everyone uses the same stages. Additionally, it can get quite messy. See graphic below for what can be viewed as funnel spaghetti (although, I’ve simplified as best I can). See below for definitions:
- Inbound (also often known as Marketing Captured Lead or MCL)
- Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
- Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
- Closed/Won or Closed/Lost
The key to getting this right is to be clear about what you need out of each stage and what each stage means for your business. The stages where it can get a bit muddled are between MQL and SQL. A sales team may argue for skipping an SAL stage because it’s “an extra step” but having an SAL stage allows the marketing team to know out of the sourced MQLs, what leads are “acceptable” versus what are actually qualified. (Knowing many sales teams often don’t move leads to a qualify stage without extensive vetting).
Another thing to keep in mind is when opportunities are created. Occasionally sales team may try to move away from leads and look at accounts – this leads to challenges of attribution later down the line. Just make sure to have a clear conversation with the sales team about your stages.
What does sales accepted look like?
A sales team may argue to not have an SAL stage because they think there’s “too much work” going from SAL to SQL. While yes, it’s true that sales accepted doesn’t have to necessarily be marked as SAL (it can just be SQL). this is not recommended as it can lead to problems with determining lead quality down the line.
Having an SAL stage allows you to know what percentage of MQL’s fit the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and are worth pursuing. An SQL stage may be set only if that SAL turns into an open opportunity (or whatever qualifier that indicates sales is going deeper into the sales process).
What are marketing’s MQL goals?
In order to determine the number of MQL’s the marketing team should support, you will need do basic funnel math. Knowing your revenue targets (and how much you believe should be sales generated versus marketing generated), conversion rates between stages, sales cycle length, and ACV – broken out by segment will give you your MQL goals.
If you’re not sure how to figure this out, you should review this post. I’ll eventually write a post that explains the math.
What the MQL handoff from marketing to sales looks like
The most common and easiest way to hand off MQLs will be through automation (see your best friend in Sales Ops for help on this if you aren’t sure how). They will be able to work with marketing ops to determine what becomes “qualified” to become an SAL (usually with an ICP profile) and who on the sales team to assign. If you have a small team (early stage start-up), you can use a round robin process. Otherwise, it should be fairly easy to assign by account or account type.
The difficult part will be holding the sales team accountable. Ensure you have clear rules as to what the sales team should do with an MQL (how they convert to SAL, and how much time and how often they engage with the SAL before turning it into an SQL, rejecting, or recycling).
The sales engagement flow
Often times the MQL evaluation should be set within 24 hours. This means as soon as a lead hits MQL, it should be automated into an assignment process to become an SAL (say for example: the MQL is part of an existing account, or part of a target account), or sent for “manual” evaluation and assignment.
From the SAL stage, there should be certain actions the sales team takes to engage with the lead. I personally am not a fan of lead scoring, so I believe leads who have MQL-ed are hand raisers – meaning they’ve expressed interest in speaking with the business. This should make it easier for a sales representative to get a response from the lead. You can easily automate reporting and reminders for sales reps to follow-up. Generally allowing anywhere from 3 or more days for multiple follow-ups until they are marked toward SQL or moved into recycle or reject.
Performance metrics
You can evaluate marketing based on sheer volume – # of MCLs and MQLs; or lead velocity (how quickly leads move through the funnel); increased conversion rates, and lead quality (how many MQLs become SALs. All of these metrics depend on where you focus – and don’t try to go after all of them at once.
Sales should be evaluated based on adhering to defined timeframes between transitions (MQL > SAL > SQLs), the # of completed activities logged on MQL profiles, and the conversion rates per AE and inside sales representative. It should be part of sales’ responsibility to provide feedback to marketing as to what their ICP looks like so marketing can support via optimizing campaigns.
Training and updates
All of this above needs to be documented in a Service Level Agreement (SLA). My preference is for detailed SLA’s, but keeping it simple can have its benefits (it’s actually read, even if it lacks the detail). The maintenance schedule (latest and upcoming review dates) and training plan need to be included for optimal execution.
Lead management is an arduous process, but getting it right from the beginning sets up long term success in your ability to measure and build optimize your growth marketing program. Think of it as playing chess (takes a bit more set-up and strategy) versus playing checkers (which is arguably much more simple than chess).
Header Photo by Charlie Solorzano on Unsplash