Background;
Fortune company generating a significant quantity of inquiries from their website. (Some phone inquiries were generated as well.)
- Many of the web inquiries generated are invalid and not true inquiries.
- Sales Force was unable to qualify and quantify most of the inquiries and since most turned out to not be valid did not put much focus into this endeavor.
- Therefore …
- Many inquiries fell into the proverbial black hole
- Inquiry follow up was not a productive use of the sales forces time.
- There was much lost opportunity.
The need;
To institute a well planned and structured database driven lead qualification opportunity development program to maximize the sales forces productivity, so that they could now focus directly on “sales ready” qualified opportunities. Pre qualification of every inquiry, to ensure that all inquiries are handled in a timely manner and only well qualified leads / sales opportunities are being handed off to the sales force for follow up. By only referring to sales people those opportunities in which the related need, pain, budget and decision making authority have been determined in advance, and in which the decision maker agrees to engage with a sales person, all leads will be followed up on in a timely manner with a greater degree of focus and motivation resulting in higher ratio of closed sales with a shorter sales cycle.
Challenges;
1. The client company, a Fortune-sized, global technology business with excellent brand recognition that had created a technology solution which enabled their intellectual property to be applied to enterprise networks. While the technology offers great potential, combined with advantageous cost structure and an extremely strong brand, the client was entering a market dominated by several large global competitors with a history of deep inroads in that business in the enterprise market. 2. The client does not employ significant staff in a customer service or on-line sales support capacity. Much of its business is transacted via a Web-based self-service model. Thus, by providing links on their site with a promise of potential human interaction, they drew an extremely high proportion of false positive inquiries. Moreover, little or no screening was done on the Web forms to weed out false positives. 3– Need for fast paced highly productive phone follow up process to screen high volume of inquires with a significant % of invalid leads due to minimal information captured through the web forms.
The eti Solution
Lead qualification; the client engaged eti Sales Support to provide front-end lead qualification of all generated inquiries leveraging best practices and relevant experience. Outbound lead generation;, eti was also tasked with initiating a well structured outbound lead generation program to uncover new qualified sales opportunities in selected target markets. While the purpose of the outbound lead generation effort was to supplement the inbound program, this activity also served to make sure that the eti Business Developers (BD’s) were kept productive even when the volume of inbound inquiries dropped. The same team of well trained, college-educated eti Business Developers was utilized in both programs. Inquiry source tracking; eti offers effective ways to stream inquiry data directly into its database, source code each inquiry and track it through the entire sales process. The process was as follows: all inquiries were immediately entered into the eti database as they were received. Each inquiry was source coded and a call was scheduled for prompt follow up by a member of the eti business development team. Most inquires generated were followed up on with a phone call within an hour of inquiry receipt. An Integrated email phone execution was deployed to streamline and reduce cost of follow up on suspect inquiries. Emails sent provided prospects with basic information and a phone number and email address they could use to connect directly with an eti representative. That tactic significantly reduced the cost of the program by cutting the handling time of suspected unqualified opportunities while providing a means for those who were indeed business prospects to engage an eti representative and be driven into the sales pipeline. By streamlining the data entry and call-assignment process and by creating an integrated phone email screening program that minimized the handling time of patently invalid inquiries, the team successfully carried out a highly cost-effective lead qualification and development effort. At the same time, we could preserve the image and brand of our client by communicating a positive professional message to all audiences.
RESULTS
General metrics:
75% of all the inquiries resulted in a meaningful conversation.
- 15% were eliminated via the pre-screening process.
- 10% were not reached
Of the meaningful conversations
- 12% were qualified and assigned to the sales force.
- 16% resulted in opportunities for other departments and lower end solutions
- 40% were determined to be invalid inquiries following one conversation
- 15% were negative dispositions
- 17% (The balance) were profiled and placed into a lead nurturing program
We received feedback from the sales force on approximately 28% of the assigned leads. (Client had opted to not mandate closed-loop reporting – a process offered by eti), preferring instead to use their own systems.
Back end results:
- 20% sale conversion ratio
- 40% is retained in the client’s sales pipelines
- 40% were lost opportunities (no sale)
- Thus, approximately 1 in 3 records that reached a terminal disposition were recorded as a sale . Thus, approximately 1 in 3 records that reached a terminal disposition were recorded as a sale.
Taking a snapshot of the program for ROI analysis purposes (as this is a moving target) we conservatively estimate that based on some 10,000 records received, that 300 sales were made at an average value per sale of $40,000. The total estimated sales revenue for the program was, therefore, $12 million. The program cost (for the snapshot) was approximately $265,000. Thus, the program ROI was projected to be $45 in revenue for every dollar expended (45:1). I fact we suspect the average value per sale is substantially higher making this conversion ratio substantially more positive.
Filed under: b2b, lead qualification, marketing, sales, Sales Support
