Lead Generation: Streamlining the process for quality over quantity
Originally published on B2B LeadBlog
For her first week on the job, Debbie Pryer, Program Manager, Siemens Healthcare, arrived ready to accept an intimidating challenge: Bring Marketing and Sales together for one common cause — generating quality leads.
According to Debbie, the process in place had been corrupted and broken by a system of incentives to drive lead volume with little check and balance in place for assessing lead quality before the handoff to Sales. The end result was a sales team overwhelmed with unqualified leads, 65% of which were tossed out.
“I had a roadmap of what was wrong,” Debbie said. “I had to figure out how to make it right.”
At MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013, Debbie’s presentation “Lead Generation: How to empower your program like Siemens Healthcare” took the audience on a deep dive into some of the challenges Siemens Healthcare faced in its lead gen process.
One of Debbie’s key goals was to re-establish a long-broken trust between Sales and Marketing.
Suggestions were made about what could solve this dilemma. Although many brought up automation, Debbie knew that by bringing in more technology as a solution, she would simply be “automating the problem.”
Challenge your process
Debbie explained that returning to the first love of the company — the patients and the hospitals that serve them — was an ideal starting point for building a lead process that put prospect needs first.
Her solution was to “slide the leads into what they were already doing” in the sales funnel, rather than pushing unqualified leads into the funnel.
With this strategy, Marketing delivered higher-quality leads to Sales, and the two teams started to (slowly) restore trust.
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