Telemarketing Lead Generation Blog

Maintain A Strategic Vision for Your Lead Generation Initiatives

Posted on Aug 12, 2008 by Kathy Rizzo, Vice President Marketing

Is tactical campaign management getting in the way of your strategic vision? It’s easy to let this happen since managing a lead generation initiative takes a great deal of focus on small details that can either make or break your results. However, it’s also important to maintain a strategic focus on your efforts.

Here are some steps that you can take to help keep strategy at the forefront of your activities:

• Be proactive with setting goals that will allow you to maintain and expand your lead generation funding. Specifically, look at the quantity and type (quality) of leads that you will need to obtain in order to achieve your required ROI. Be sure to look at historical sales closure data, as well as average order size. Communicate this goal with all relevant parties and compare it to benchmarks to ensure it’s reachable. Set your reporting mechanisms to measure activity against your goals on an ongoing basis.

• Connect the dots when running multiple campaigns to ensure you’re capitalizing on data from other similarly focused campaigns. For instance, if you are running a lead generation program focused on a specific product group and you’ve implemented past programs focused on this same product group, always review your previous campaign database as it’s likely ripe with contacts prime for your new campaign.

• Before you launch…Think about your campaign from your prospect’s perspective (your target market). Ask yourself if you are providing a relevant message and relevant content based on their characteristics (industry, title, environment, etc).

• Engage in a formal debrief meeting after every lead generation campaign (or monthly if an ongoing effort) to review market analysis and lessons learned. In particular, the market analysis that you obtain via telemarketing can lead to your next marketing initiative. Market trends may dictate changes to your overall messaging or/and market approach, or competitive data obtained could lead you to a “competitive attack” initiative.

• Proactively look for potential black-hole “leaks” in your processes and develop proactive solutions. Leads fall into the black-hole when they are passed to sales too early, when there’s lack of closed loop follow-up and/or when there are inefficiencies in the CRM and accountability tools.

• Plan beyond your initial telemarketing “touch” to ensure you have a next step for prospects that are not sales ready. This may include an immediate second touch email with a relevant whitepaper to prospects that are in the “investigation” phase. A thorough strategy will include an ongoing nurturing contact schedule with well-timed emails and phone calls.

Tactical aspects of your campaigns can be overwhelming at times, however, if you set aside time to strategize, it will ultimately improve your results, processes and ROI.

Tagged: lead generation strategy, lead nurturing, lead generation, targeted lead generation, telemarketing sales leads, sales lead management

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