Telemarketing Lead Generation Blog

Bridging the Gap between Marketing and Sales to Ensure Telemarketing Lead Generation Success

Posted on Mar 5, 2008 by Kathy Rizzo, Vice President Marketing

Bridging the gap between marketing and sales is an ongoing challenge for most organizations. However, it’s also an essential part to making telemarketing lead generation programs successful. Without buy-in from your sales team, a lead generation program is less likely to succeed. Here are some proactive steps you can take to help bridge the gap:

1. The sales organization is the end-user of your leads. The mistake that many marketers make is defining the criteria for their lead classifications without input and buy-in from the sales department. Defining the lead criteria is a responsibility of both marketing and sales managers. Before your campaign launches, meet with sales management to jointly determine the criteria for a telemarketing sales lead. Also, make sure you directly address long-term leads with your sales management. Will the sales reps be responsible for nurturing long-term leads? If they do not have the bandwidth or desire to work long-term leads, then you’ll need to create a lead-nurturing program within marketing. If you don’t address this now, you’re more likely to have leads fall into a black hole. Important Step: Once your “sales-ready” lead definition is established be sure to document and communicate it (more than once) to everyone who will receive leads from your telemarketing campaigns.
2. Your telemarketing vendor should engage in a due-diligence process before developing your telemarketing campaigns. This is a discovery practice to ensure all the components (i.e. messaging, market, competitive landscape, objection handling, FAQ, reporting, lead distribution, etc) are discussed thoroughly in order to make the program a success. Make sure to designate 2 or 3 key sales members to participate in this due diligence process. There is extreme value in getting sales’ input on critical components such as objection handling, competitive position, frequently asked questions, etc. Although you likely have product sheets that cover this information, there’s no replacing the knowledge gained from interviewing your “feet on the street”. Ultimately, by engaging members of your sales team at this stage, your program will be more successful and you’ll have more buy-in.
3. Establish a regular conference call (monthly is recommended) with key members of your sales team and your telemarketing vendor to discuss overall lead quality and depth / type of information captured, as well as the changing needs of the sales team to ensure the program continually meets their requirements. Make sure to set a specific agenda for the conference calls and communicate it well in advance. While organizing this concall can seem overwhelming, an easy option is to designate regional sales managers on a rotating basis to participate in the conference calls. This keeps participation manageable and also gives you a wider range of feedback.

Closed loop feedback is essential. Please see last week’s blog post: Tips for Sales Lead Management

Also, an interesting statistic from our recent telemarketing survey is that our “best in class” marketers were three times more likely to have a formal and regular communication mechanism in place with their sales organization. Read Full Survey Results

Tagged: lead generation, telemarketing sales leads, sales lead management, lead managment sales, generation leads

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