Kathleen Schaub, Research Vice President, CMO Advisory Service of IDC, recently spoke at a Northern CA Business Marketing Association (BMA) meeting. The topic – “Transforming Lead Management: How the New Buyer is Killing Your Funnel (And what to do about it).” Here are some key take-aways from her presentation.

  • Due to the vast amount of information on the Internet, power is in the hands of buyers and often times they may be more knowledgeable about products then sales reps.
  • Buyers value information from a vendor’s technical team or collateral more so than information from a sales rep.
  • Buyers don’t want to be sold to; they know how to buy and will reward companies who provide good value with a fair price and their loyalty.

The average time it takes for vendors to create a new customer (target identification to closed deal) from companies with over 1,000 employees is 19 months. The average conversion rate from target to deal is .15% (or 1 out of 650 leads). A vendor’s sales and marketing process can impact loyalty. Almost 40% of customers surveyed had switched vendors due to a poor relationship with a sales rep. Source: IDC’s 2012 Sales Productivity Benchmarks Database and IDC’s 2012 Tech Marketing Benchmarks Database.

Because of the changes in the buying process, IDC has developed a model which they call “The IDC Customer Creation Framework.” This framework is buyer-centric versus sales-centric, integrates marketing and sales and is smart (data-driven, automated, agile and grounded in management science). I like the simplicity of this model:

The Buyer’s Journey

  1. Exploration
  2. Evaluation
  3. Purchase

Sales and marketing professionals engage in a relevant digital dialog with buyers at each stage. At the exploration stage, buyers “raise their hand” to indicate interest. Thought leadership content is appropriate here. At the evaluation stage they “agree to be pursued” and like product comparisons. At the purchase stage, they are willing to have an interpersonal dialog with sales.

IDC has also developed a “21st Century Pipeline Management Model” containing these seven steps:

  1. Strategic Planning (including SLAs for acceptable leads at each level, integrated systems and close-loop plans)
  2. Capture (data cleansing is key here)
  3. Assess (use buyer-centric qualification criteria)
  4. Advance (based on clear routing rules)
  5. Develop (nurture with relevant content based on the buyer’s stage)
  6. Close (keeping in mind lifetime value of the account)
  7. Monitor, measure, analyze

Steps 4,5,and 6 are repeated as needed for any one lead. And step 7 happens continuously throughout the entire system (stages 1-6).

Best practices include having periodic sales and marketing council meetings to agree on standards and using corporate marketing, especially campaign management and sales enablement teams, to supply sales tools to the field rather than product marketing. These new models and best practices will lead to a healthier and more predictable pipeline, improve productivity and increase alignment between marketing and sales.

More information on IDC and Kathleen Schaub.