If your “help” is hurting someone, it is enabling them.
We’ve all heard of the classic cases of enabling…the wife who calls her husband’s boss to tell him the husband is sick when he’s really hung-over; the parents who let the drug-abusing 25-year-old son live at home because “he can’t find a job.” Enabling shields loved ones in the name of love. However, consequences may be exactly what are needed to shatter the denial that allows addicts, or even just lazy children, to keep from hurting themselves and others.
A very well respected organization in the marketing and sales alignment business now reports that most companies have done all they can to help sales at the top of the funnel. Now what is needed, they say, is to provide support to sales people in the middle and late stages of the buying process. This is frequently referred to as sales enablement. With sales enablement are we shielding those we love? Let’s look at the number of opportunities companies are currently leaving on the table before we try to find more ways to “help” sales:
Marketing Qualified Leads
On average sales reps qualify less than one-third of the leads they are given. That means either two-thirds of the leads generated by marketing are useless; or sale reps are not very effective at qualifying leads. The truth is both sides are at fault. The result is leakage between marketing and sales on marketing qualified leads. Too many marketing qualified leads end up in a black hole. Leakage occurs.
Sales Accepted Leads
Sales must first “accept” leads and then qualify them. Skipping this step makes it easy for marketing and sales to operate without an agreed upon lead definition; and visibility into lead quality is lost due to the time it takes sales to fully qualify leads. Unfortunately, sales reps hate to “accept” leads. And they don’t have to in most companies. The reason leads are not accepted is that less than half of the leads sales accepts are actually qualified (at least in their opinion). Without lead definitions and the sales accepted lead step, more leakage occurs.
Sales Qualified Lead?
Keep in mind as we discuss this step that sales has by now either ignored or rejected close to 70% of the marketing qualified leads generated. Also keep in mind that average companies close 20% of sales qualified leads while best-in-class companies close almost 30%. When I ask sales people for the percent of sales qualified leads they close, I frequently hear 60 – 80%. The question they are answering is not the question I was asking. They are answering this question: “What percent of the business you thought you would win did you win”?
What is going on? Sales reps do not want to sign-up for losing four out of five times (or in the best case at least two out of three times). And, few sales reps want their manager and their manager’s manager calling to find out the status of a deal they made the mistake of forecasting—and then lose four out of five times. It just isn’t worth it. And, most companies do not have “teeth” around their processes—there is zero accountability between lead generation and revenue. So, of the less than one-third of leads sales’ qualifies, they close 20% for a net of about 7% of total leads generated. A lot more leakage.
The Sales Process
The final place for leakage is in the sales process. There are scores, if not hundreds, of sales methodologies. In reality, a simple five-step sales process will help you diagnose where deals go off track in your company. First here are the universal steps in most sales processes:
Find a pain or need
Get agreement that there is pain or need
Get agreement to do something about the pain or need
Agree on a generic solution
Agree on a customized solution
The core problem is that most marketing programs create “opportunities” that are at Step #1. Most sales people start selling at Step #5. Even when marketing qualifies a lead through Step #3, sales often starts selling at Step #5. We even had one sales rep follow-up on a lead by saying: “Some telemarketing company in Atlanta said you were interested in buying our solution. What is it that you want to buy?” It seems sometimes that when the prospect does not have a purchase order in one hand and a pen in the other that the lead was not good. The result of this is much more leakage.
Before we Invest More, Let’s Fix What is Broken Now
There are four key actions to take away:
If marketing and sales are not in agreement about the definition of a lead then the top of the funnel problem is not fixed. When only one third of marketing qualified leads are being qualified by sales there is a big problem.
Unless sales’ is required to formally “accept” leads, there will be no way of measuring the effectiveness of marketing or sales.
What percentage of your leads become sales qualified and what percent close? Are you above or below best-in-class? If close rates are reported at 40 – 80%, you are leaving a LOT of money on the table. The money is being left on the table because too many opportunities are either ignored or squandered.
Based on the lead definition, where does the hand-off to sales currently occur and how can you fix that?
Sales Enablement
A guy I worked for twenty years ago used to say: “you never go to war with sales because you are going to lose”. That is God’s truth! However, has the pendulum swung too far? At what point are we going over the line, and moving from helping sales to sales enablement. For example, companies are now building what they call “sales accelerators” to help sales in the mid-to-late stages of an evaluation. And, to a great extent these sales accelerators are needed because, at least theoretically, buyers are taking themselves through 70% of the buyer’s journey before sales needs to get involved. I say baloney. Companies could close up to five times more business without additional tools by simply optimizing the current marketing and sales process.
Download “Point C: From Chaos to Kickass – Three Steps to align Sales and Marketing” for a deeper dive into this issue.
by Dan McDade
http://www.thejfblogit.co.uk/
We’ve all heard of the classic cases of enabling…the wife who calls her husband’s boss to tell him the husband is sick when he’s really hung-over; the parents who let the drug-abusing 25-year-old son live at home because “he can’t find a job.” Enabling shields loved ones in the name of love. However, consequences may be exactly what are needed to shatter the denial that allows addicts, or even just lazy children, to keep from hurting themselves and others.
A very well respected organization in the marketing and sales alignment business now reports that most companies have done all they can to help sales at the top of the funnel. Now what is needed, they say, is to provide support to sales people in the middle and late stages of the buying process. This is frequently referred to as sales enablement. With sales enablement are we shielding those we love? Let’s look at the number of opportunities companies are currently leaving on the table before we try to find more ways to “help” sales:
Marketing Qualified Leads
On average sales reps qualify less than one-third of the leads they are given. That means either two-thirds of the leads generated by marketing are useless; or sale reps are not very effective at qualifying leads. The truth is both sides are at fault. The result is leakage between marketing and sales on marketing qualified leads. Too many marketing qualified leads end up in a black hole. Leakage occurs.
Sales Accepted Leads
Sales must first “accept” leads and then qualify them. Skipping this step makes it easy for marketing and sales to operate without an agreed upon lead definition; and visibility into lead quality is lost due to the time it takes sales to fully qualify leads. Unfortunately, sales reps hate to “accept” leads. And they don’t have to in most companies. The reason leads are not accepted is that less than half of the leads sales accepts are actually qualified (at least in their opinion). Without lead definitions and the sales accepted lead step, more leakage occurs.
Sales Qualified Lead?
Keep in mind as we discuss this step that sales has by now either ignored or rejected close to 70% of the marketing qualified leads generated. Also keep in mind that average companies close 20% of sales qualified leads while best-in-class companies close almost 30%. When I ask sales people for the percent of sales qualified leads they close, I frequently hear 60 – 80%. The question they are answering is not the question I was asking. They are answering this question: “What percent of the business you thought you would win did you win”?
What is going on? Sales reps do not want to sign-up for losing four out of five times (or in the best case at least two out of three times). And, few sales reps want their manager and their manager’s manager calling to find out the status of a deal they made the mistake of forecasting—and then lose four out of five times. It just isn’t worth it. And, most companies do not have “teeth” around their processes—there is zero accountability between lead generation and revenue. So, of the less than one-third of leads sales’ qualifies, they close 20% for a net of about 7% of total leads generated. A lot more leakage.
The Sales Process
The final place for leakage is in the sales process. There are scores, if not hundreds, of sales methodologies. In reality, a simple five-step sales process will help you diagnose where deals go off track in your company. First here are the universal steps in most sales processes:
Find a pain or need
Get agreement that there is pain or need
Get agreement to do something about the pain or need
Agree on a generic solution
Agree on a customized solution
The core problem is that most marketing programs create “opportunities” that are at Step #1. Most sales people start selling at Step #5. Even when marketing qualifies a lead through Step #3, sales often starts selling at Step #5. We even had one sales rep follow-up on a lead by saying: “Some telemarketing company in Atlanta said you were interested in buying our solution. What is it that you want to buy?” It seems sometimes that when the prospect does not have a purchase order in one hand and a pen in the other that the lead was not good. The result of this is much more leakage.
Before we Invest More, Let’s Fix What is Broken Now
There are four key actions to take away:
If marketing and sales are not in agreement about the definition of a lead then the top of the funnel problem is not fixed. When only one third of marketing qualified leads are being qualified by sales there is a big problem.
Unless sales’ is required to formally “accept” leads, there will be no way of measuring the effectiveness of marketing or sales.
What percentage of your leads become sales qualified and what percent close? Are you above or below best-in-class? If close rates are reported at 40 – 80%, you are leaving a LOT of money on the table. The money is being left on the table because too many opportunities are either ignored or squandered.
Based on the lead definition, where does the hand-off to sales currently occur and how can you fix that?
Sales Enablement
A guy I worked for twenty years ago used to say: “you never go to war with sales because you are going to lose”. That is God’s truth! However, has the pendulum swung too far? At what point are we going over the line, and moving from helping sales to sales enablement. For example, companies are now building what they call “sales accelerators” to help sales in the mid-to-late stages of an evaluation. And, to a great extent these sales accelerators are needed because, at least theoretically, buyers are taking themselves through 70% of the buyer’s journey before sales needs to get involved. I say baloney. Companies could close up to five times more business without additional tools by simply optimizing the current marketing and sales process.
Download “Point C: From Chaos to Kickass – Three Steps to align Sales and Marketing” for a deeper dive into this issue.
by Dan McDade
http://www.thejfblogit.co.uk/
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