That is, if you ask members of a sales organization how the marketing organization performs in terms of supplying them with “good” leads, they’ll answer – more often than not – that marketing clearly doesn’t know what they’re doing, always handing over crummy leads.

If you ask marketing folks how the sales team performs when it comes to following up on leads and converting them to sales, you’ll often hear that sales people are lazy and never follow up.

So which version of reality is true? Both. And neither. The fact is, most lead generation programs produce only what we at McBru would deem to be “contacts,” not actual leads. These are people who wanted to download a whitepaper or watch a webcast, but who may or may not actually be potential customers (prospects). And, when marketing hands those contacts over to sales, members of the sales organization often cherry-pick those companies they know they’d like to sell to. Those random selections most likely won’t yield anyone who is actually interested in buying.

No-win lead generation
Many tech btob marketing folks – and more than a few salespeople – have come to realize this is a no-win approach to lead generation. At a minimum, contacts have to be qualified and profiled before being turned over to sales. Ideally, they should be nurtured to increase the likelihood they will in fact be ready to engage with sales. Hence the growing popularity of marketing automation tools that aggregate, profile and qualify leads.

The problem is that most such systems don’t really qualify leads. They instead rely on a scoring mechanism, assigning points based on actions a contact takes, then inferring (aka guessing) that a certain point total means that person is a sales prospect or lead. But, as my friend Thompson Morrison says, “Guessing is cheap. Guessing wrong is really expensive.”

Wouldn’t it be better to take the guesswork out? For marketing to only hand over contacts who identify themselves as leads, ready to engage with sales? The odds of that type of lead yielding good results would be much, much higher.

Self-identifying leads
At McBru we believe the process of converting a contact to a prospect to a lead to a customer starts with a marketing conversation and eventually transitions to a sales conversation. That inflection point at which someone moves from a marketing conversation (awareness, interest, consideration) into a sales conversation (evaluation, intent, purchase) is hard to pinpoint. In fact, the only person who knows for sure when it happens is the prospect himself. So, why not let him tell you when he is ready to have a sales conversation?

A powerful lead generation and nurturing program needs to intelligently engage in a marketing conversation with contacts and prospects. This means it has to consistently and continuously provide content assets that prospective customers find really valuable: reference designs, app notes, benchmarks, and the like. And, it needs to provide a mechanism for prospects to “answer.”

Soliciting feedback and input from prospects is a way to learn more about their needs and interests, so you can provide more targeted information. It is also the mechanism by which a prospect can tell you “I’m ready for pricing and availability information” or “I would like an eval copy” or whatever the magic trigger is for your product or service that lets you know that prospect is now ready to move from a marketing conversation to a sales conversation.

Intelligent lead nurturing
We've recently deployed a new service at McBru called Intelligent Lead Nurturing. In a nutshell, we create a landing page full of juicy content assets, embed a remarkable piece of technology known as an intelligent dialog, and cultivate consistent, ongoing engagements to move folks from a marketing conversation to a sales conversation. The intelligent dialog allows us to collect profiling and contact data, plus gives contacts and prospects plenty of chances to identify when they are “sales-ready,” meaning ready to talk with a sales rep.

What are we finding so far?

	•		Of the people we drive to the nurturing page, about half voluntarily complete our dialog.
	•		On average 20% who complete the intelligent dialog identify themselves as sales-ready.
	•		The prospects who aren’t yet sales-ready are quite willing to share valuable profiling information, because of the nature of the intelligent dialog experience.

It’s too early to say conclusively the percentage of sales-ready leads who go on to convert to sold and servicing customers. What we’re certain of is that we have richer, more robust profiling information on prospects, allowing us to nurture them in a targeted fashion. And contacting a lead who has self-identified as sales-ready is a lot more enjoyable than cold-calling a list of people who stopped by your tradeshow booth. A fact on which both marketing and sales agree.

If you are interested in learning more about our intelligent nurturing service, let us know.

Thanks for reading.

Kerry McClenahan, CEO
McClenahan Bruer Communications