Create a Winning Lead Dialogue: How to Optimize Your Contact Strategy

Nothing in this world is pure, and direct mail is no exception. Direct mail isn’t purely a marketing medium. When done properly, it’s a combination of marketing and sales. Review the best direct mail programs you can think of; they will all reflect this fact. Given the close relationship of marketing and sales, creating great direct mail requires that you:• work to avoid some of the critical mistakes even seasoned professionals fall into;• be able to adjust your lead flow and quality to the needs of your sales team; and • get maximum value out of every lead.Go Far Enough … but Don’t Go Too FarFirst, let’s talk about the two critical mistakes that even seasoned direct marketers make. Remember these words: lead generation. Direct mail is not an awareness tool. Print, television, radio and outdoor advertising all are more cost-effective ways to get your name in front of the right people. Direct mail can be up to 1,000 percent more expensive on a cost-per-touch basis. Besides, when was the last time you saw people gathered around the water cooler talking about the amazing piece of direct mail they just got? Unless you hang out with me, you just won’t see it. A second mistake that too many direct marketers make is they try to take the lead too far down the sales process in the first communication. Push prospects too far too fast, and you’ll lose them. If you have salespeople, use them. It’s not direct mail’s job to close the deal.At the first stage of the process, you’re just giving them enough to realize that this product, service or idea is something they need to learn more about, and that it might just save their lives, make them rich, etc. All you have to do is get them to the point where “it might just …”.The Quantity/Quality Valve At this point, there often is a credibility gap where sales and marketing don’t work together well. If the sales team believes the leads your programs generate are not qualified, they won’t work them as hard as they could. Who wants to waste time on a bunch of bad leads?A lead used to be a simple thing. Anyone who raised his or her hand in response to an offer qualified as a lead. Someone who liked the look of your tchotchke and figured, “I’ll tolerate your salesperson for five minutes to get my hands on that great-looking decoder ring,” was a lead, as was a person with a pen in hand, ready to write the check. It’s not that simple anymore. To pass muster with the sales department, you need to give them leads they feel are qualified and ready to talk turkey. To do that, you need to get inside the thought process of your sales team. You need to engage them and find out what they consider a qualified lead. Most marketing professionals fail to do this.The disconnect between marketing and sales is the main reason most direct marketing programs break down on the back end. Getting response is one of direct mail’s great strengths, especially if you know how to use it. If you have salespeople, their great strength is closing deals. Use them for that. The No. 1 obstacle to moving leads through to the sales team is the perception that leads are not qualified and not worth working. This obstacle actually can be an opportunity for direct marketing. In lead generation you have the opportunity to make prospects raise their hands. Using a survey and offer, your direct mail program also can create a lead valve that you can adjust with a great deal of accuracy to meet your sales department’s demands. Here’s how:1) Devise offers as a valve to adjust the flow of leads and their qualification levels. A hot offer, for example, will attract a larger pool of possibly less qualified leads depending on your list. 2) Work with sales to establish the business rules that determine the quality of a lead and the survey questions.3) Give the survey questions weight based on qualification criteria so you can separate your leads into those ready to pass on to sales and those that need to be maintained until they are ready to talk with the sales team.Through testing you can adjust your offers and the questions you’re asking in the survey for a more efficient lead flow.Lead Ownership: Keep Every Lead Swimming in the Right DirectionOnce your lead generation valve is operating and you can adjust the quantity and qualification level of your leads on a consistent basis, you run into another problem between your marketing team and your sales force: time.A salesperson lives or dies on monthly or quarterly numbers. He or she needs leads with a short sales horizon. The trouble is that many of the leads you’ll develop with your fine-tuned system simply will not fall within the salesperson’s quota timeline. The salesperson might intend to get back to the lead that has a purchase timeline of six months or more, but there’s no guarantee it will happen. That lead often simply falls off the sales schedule. It should be marketing’s job to keep your company top-of-mind until it’s time to get sales involved again. The Contact StrategyIf possible, every sale is the result of a dialogue. The marketer’s challenge is to keep leads engaged, thinking about the company and liking the company until the salesperson contacts them again. You can design this dialogue so the stream of conversation between you and the lead is always pushing the lead in the direction of a “yes” answer when the salesperson asks. Your sales dialogue should make the greatest use of all the appropriate technologies at your disposal: mail, telemarketing, e-mail and print ads all should be considered part of the mix.Every contact should be a two-way communication where your lead can say “yes” or “no” or whatever is appropriate at that stage. At each point of contact, you should act on the lead’s answers in a way that makes sense.Your lead dialogue is a decision tree where you’re presenting leads with options (see sample above), and they are choosing the most appropriate one for them. As long as you’re keeping them engaged and focused on the sales decision, you’re doing well. Make sure every touch gives you intelligence on each lead’s interests and business needs. If you’re doing it right, you’re also supplying information that’s important to their decision process.Here are some simple ways you can endear your company to your leads and give them reasons to be grateful to you. You want leads not only thinking you will provide the right product, but impressed that you have gone the extra mile. • Make leads feel like your exclusive client: “Please accept this Preferred Software Leader discount at …”• Give them information that makes their lives easier: “Here are some tips for travel professionals we thought you might find useful.” • Offer them programs of specific value to their fields: WebEx, an online communications company, sponsors free online seminars—using its own product. They are very informative and they model WebEx’s product beautifully.Your leads can follow a virtually infinite number of paths through your lead contact strategy. The important thing is making sure there is a current constantly pushing toward a sale or keeping your company top-of-mind with leads. Then, when the leads are well prepared and the timing is right for the sale, your marketing team can pass on leads that are better educated about your product and ready to buy. If you’ve created and executed your lead strategy correctly, your leads will have had a good experience along the way.Spyro Kourtis is president of The Hacker Group, a subsidiary of Foote Cone Belding Worldwide located in Bellevue, Wash. Kourtis can be reached at (425) 454-8556 or skourtis@hackergroup.com.

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Create a Winning Lead Dialogue: How to Optimize Your Contact Strategy

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