Know-How Exchange : Other

Start by defining your lead-prospect-oportunity-sales-invoice process. This would be your marketing-sales funnel. Think the following steps:
1. Marketing activity target list
2. Prospect list (respondents)
3. Qualification step (telemarketing)
4. Sales prospect hand-over (which ones is sales picking up)
5. Sales opportunities (which ones make it to the pipeline)
6. Sales deals

Then make sure you have a single view of the customer in your database. Sales and marketing would work off the same records. Also agree with sales what a qualified prospect actually is (contains budget info, timeframe, decision makers, product).

Then add all your interaction events, especially the marketing ones, to these contacts. Once contacts or their companies, have become part of a prospective sales deal, you have a registration of your effort.

An example:
You have a contact Paul Kemper at company Tauros Marketing. You find in your database that Tauros Marketing has never purchased anything.

You now go through step 1, which is an e-mail blast that includes Paul Kemper. Make a note on the Paul Kemper record that he received an e-mail blast.

Next, Paul Kemper visits your web site a few days later and registers (or you register a click-through from your e-mail blast). This would be interaction fact 2.

Then you would have a telemarketing team call Paul Kemper to qualify the lead.

If Paul Kemper is interested, create a sales prospect in the system. At some point in time a sales person adds a potential deal for Tauros Marketing to your system. That will relate back to Paul Kemper and the e-mail blast and click-through. This indicates a link and a clear ROI for the potential Tauros Marketing deal.

One word of warning: at every step in the process you need to measure totals. This way you get a clear picture of the conversion rates and can relate marketing $$ to sales $$.

Of course multiple marketing interactions can generate one and the same sales deal, so if you really want to be academic about it, you are in for some very complicated measurements and analysis.

In your case I would suggest not to make a too detailed analysis. Go by the general conversion numbers and establish a common set of metrics. If you stick to it for some time, you will see trends. These trends should be your starting point for discussions on marketing, sales and handover efficiency.

In short: when you get started, focus on the trends, not the actual ROI. And agree upfront with sales.

Some metrics I found when I did this:
Marketing activity to lead conversion: 1:100 .. 1:3 (depending on activity type)
Lead to prospect conversion: 1:5
Prospect to sales opportunity conversion: 1:5
Sales opportunity to deal conversion: 1:3

Paul makes some good points. To me, most of the lead nurturing activity comes between step two and step three on his list.

I like to use an analogy to agriculture. To me, the qualifications step in sales and marketing is comparable to an inspection staff in agriculture. In other words, one might inspect the crops to see if it is time to send in the reapers.

But first you need to cultivate the crop. And this can take months of effort. You spend months watering, fertilizing, and caring for the crop before it is “ qualified” for reaping. And I believe it is very difficult but not impossible to create hard and fast metrics for this process. I also believe that traditional telemarketing is poorly suited to this task.

If you would like to discuss this further, send me an e-mail and we can set up a time to talk.

Take care and good luck.