Creating a Laser Focused, Lead Generation TEAM

The dictionary defines FOCUS as: “The ability to concentrate one’s attention or to sustain concentration”.

I think we all can agree that during our lives when we are focused on whatever task we are involved in our performance has a higher chance of success.

Creating Focus

When you think of creating focus within your sales organization the first task must be to develop well-defined roles and responsibilities. The clearer these roles are defined, the better chance your sales team has for success. The more singular the focus of each role the better chance for success in that role.

The second task would be to understand what shared tasks there are between your sales and marketing teams. Once again, the more focus you can bring to these tasks the better chance of success. This post is going to focus on, perhaps, the most crucial of those shared tasks: Lead Generation!

Creating Alignment

If your sales and marketing organizations are not completely in line with their shared goals, then you are not maximizing their impact as a team. When you think about driving alignment between these groups around lead generation, it starts with agreeing on the right targets and the right expectations. Only then can everyone execute on what they committed to do. This is the essence of the TEAM approach. Each person and function have a role to play on this TEAM, and if they follow through with their commitments the organization will have a higher lead-to-opportunity conversion process, with increased bookings soon to follow.

With tight alignment between sales and marketing on lead generation roles and targets, budgets become more pliable, with dollars moving between sales and marketing as needed to create increasingly cost-effective approaches to lead gen.

Creating Structure

The type of product/service you are selling (EG: high volume/ low dollar vs. low volume/high dollar) will dictate the type of lead generation strategies and tactics you deploy. But first, your sales and marketing leaders need to agree on some structural elements: goals, metrics, resource allocation, and policies to change behavior around lead generation. At minimum:

• Establish the percentage of Next Twelve Months (NTM) revenue that is expected from current customer expansion.

• Set the percentage of NTM revenue that is expected from Net New Customers (NNC).

• Marketing and Sales leaders need to define what constitutes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).

• Marketing must establish (based on historical data or new experiments) how many base inquiries it takes to generate a MQL and how many MQLs it takes to generate one SQL.

• Sales must establish a baseline for how many SQLs are needed to generate a booking. (Whatever your specific definition of SQL, it needs to be viewed as an initial stage opportunity within your sales pipeline.)

• Sales and Marketing must establish timelines for responding to MQLs.

• Finally, Sales and Marketing leadership needs to establish both individual and shared goals for:

  • MQLs generated and converted to SQLs

  • Opportunities created from MQLs/SQLs

  • Booking targets (Marketing should own their own booking targets that were generated from their MQLs.)

The Focused TEAM

If your sales and marketing teams seem to be working against each other or playing the blame game around lead generation, taking these steps to gain teamwork and alignment will, at a minimum, start to highlight where your teams are not aligned and what is causing the friction.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. Remember, success is not a straight line. Whenever I embarked on something new with my team I always reminded them of this picture:

It will feel like two steps forward and one step back at times. However, continued improvement will drive real teamwork and real results.

Henry Ford said it best:

"Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success."

Jerry Rulli, Partner