The Future Of Lead Management
Produced by: Performark, Written by: Dick Lee
What do technical support staff, direct marketers, supermarket cashiers, bank lobby staff, home center store clerks and lead management personnel all have in common? Bit of a brain teaser, eh? Well, the answer's actually quite simple. If you take your cues and news from the propeller-head press, techno-tools should have rendered most of their roles obsolete by now. Should have. Funny though, they're all still around -- in some cases actually growing in numbers.
Why didn't the people "go away?"
So what happened to the supposed onrush of people-replacing technologies? Funny things happened on the way to the future.
- "Artificial intelligence" has so far proven to be artificial, but relatively unintelligent and outright insensitive as well.
- Predictive modeling proved only predictive in the presence of models. And turns out that many B2B companies lack the requisite customer counts or transaction frequencies for deriving sufficiently defined customer models to support it.
- E-mail became a spam sandwich. Hey, spam has reduced junk snail mail volumes so much that Glad or some other trash can liner company ought to sue for loss of business. Can you believe that direct mail is becoming a way to bypass e-mail clutter?
- Supermarket self-scanners couldn't check cartons for broken eggs, nor did they alert you that the liquid you were slipping and slopping through while shopping was your milk leaking. And for that matter, they didn't ask if you found everything or chat you up so you didn't choke on the size of your grocery bill.
- Loan approval systems didn't recognize that your last year's income was low because you were living off Aflac insurance for seven months. Hey, did you really have to try twisting your head around so the baseball cap you wear backward would be frontward? No matter, lobby loan people have seen stranger.
- Home center customer kiosks could easily direct you to the right shelf on the right aisle to find what you wanted. But they sure didn't tell you that what you wanted wasn't what you needed -- and that you were about to do something really stupid that would wind up costing you far more than the price of the inappropriate hardware item in your hand.
And what happened when we tried substituting technology for people in lead management?
More funny stuff.
When we tried sending e-mail messages to long-term prospects asking if we could "check in" periodically, the typical response was no response or just plain "no." Whereas old-fashioned phone calls garner many more "yes" responses.
Asking web visitors requesting a PDF white paper to check the appropriate box to indicate their purchase cycle produced mostly "Next year" responses or no response at all. Whereas phone follow-up typically nails down specific time frames, most of them strangely sooner, along with a read on prospect potential. Even quick-crafted, personal e-mail messages tailored to requestors' interests fare much better in capturing prospect information.
And then there was predictive modeling used to determine prospect potential. We learned that the higher the product price point the lower the volume of transactions and even customers -- hence, in the absence of sufficient data the lower the predictability of our models. Human intuition often proved a stronger predictor than data-based projections. Plus, in service sectors such as investing we learned the hard way that all the data analysis in the world, based on what information we could capture, could not identify key indicators such as risk tolerance. Whereas person-to-person contact very effectively captures such nuances.
And we could go on and on and on from a lead management perspective.
Technology ineffectiveness is just one issue -- "customer choice" matters even more
But these disappointments with the outcomes of substituting technology for people tell only part of the story. We still haven't touched on the "mutha" of all reasons why certain job categories aren't going away as predicted:
Customers want to choose for themselves whether their interactions with companies will be with people or through technology.
This fundamental fact of life in today's marketplace applies across the board -- regardless of whether customers are on the initiating or receiving end of business communication.
Customer-to-machine communication is particularly ungratifying
Have you ever sat at your phone yelling "I want a person. I want a person. I want a..." as the computer-prompted voice on the other end asks you irrelevant question after irrelevant question? If you have, you remember, for a while at least, not just the act but the circumstances and which company perpetrated this two-way monologue.
From the standpoint of customers initiating contact, especially the customer service calls we so often hate to make, the majority of customers are already hacked over business replacing too many people with too much technology. Companies can ignore the multiple sources of research findings demonstrating just how teed off they are, but they can't rationally rebut the findings.
Bottom line, customers are gradually forcing companies to put people back on the job -- and not just any people, but well-trained, empowered people.
But machine-to customer communication can do even more damage to customer relationships
On the flip side of the coin, machine-to-customer communication, almost all of it marketing communication, has become terribly irksome. And while customers are less vocal on this issue than on customer service issues, this "propeller head" marketing can do more and more lasting damage to customer relationships.
Just think how much customers have to be irked about: the "machine gun" approach, where customers receive non-stop messages; the "shotgun approach," where customers receive irrelevant messages; the "bombardment," where companies lob messages by every available means regardless of customers' expressed channel preferences; the "frontal assault," where customers receive messages from both marketing and sales, which are rarely coordinated; the "ambush," where customers believe they're going to receive detailed information but get an e-mail sales pitch instead; and of course spamming (politely known as "prospecting to unknown suspects").
Hey, with all these "jam communication down customer throats" tactics, no wonder so many customers view most "opt-in" communication (alias "permission marketing") so cynically. It's "force open the door a crack, then send in the whole brigade," time. Yeah, but is the technology ever cool!
So is the technology that drives machine-triggered sales communication. The rep's computer signals it's time to re-contact a customer. The rep knows that the customer doesn't want to be bothered until a major internal project is complete, but a CRM system is grading rep performance on whether or not this call is made -- so the rep either makes the call, with adverse consequences; or lies about making the call which starts the rep down a path companies really don't want him or her to go.
Likewise, computers can generate sales follow-up requests by the thousands with just a mouse click. Yup, flush thousands of "untreated" raw sales inquiries right down the sales pipeline. Then hold reps accountable for following up each and every inquiry. Talk about irritating customers and prospective customers. And talk about irritating sales -- especially by sending out "leads" for tire kickers such as students writing papers and customers committed to competitors looking for reasons to stay committed. You should see some of the sales call reports that result.
Machine-generated marketing communication and machine-triggered sales contact really do put customers in companies' cross-hairs. At least with marketing you can hit "delete." Well, I suppose you could with a sales rep, too.
The value of "nuanced communication"
So how do we keep customers out of the cross-hairs and show some respect for them?
For openers, we need to start responding to customer distaste for abusive company-to-customer communication the way some smart companies are responding to dislike for customer-to-machine support communication -- be restoring human some staffing. And that doesn't mean cutting the contact center staff to free up people to create more "humane" marketing and sales environments. Getting on the right side of customers will take adding the resources required to harness technology and leverage its strengths -- which will support customer communication that respects customer preferences (and intelligence) and reflects customer status in the purchase cycle (if they've ever entered the purchase cycle).
In a B2B environment with sizable customers and transactions, this suggests:
- Taking full advantage of direct, person-to-person communication opportunities.
- Focusing more on listening and responding (hard for most machines) and correspondingly less on talking, marketing and selling.
- Going beyond "check box" answers on web forms to elicit more customer information that will help define customer interests (and disinterest, too).
- Capturing and recording (yes, on a computer) everything significant customers communicate to us, whether directly or indirectly.
- Making this information available at every customer touch point -- which we're already learning to do, but often before we gather meaningful information.
- Complementing customer-provided information with responsibly applied third-party data appends (but respecting the primacy of customer-supplied information).
- But most importantly, listening and reacting to what customers tell us.
But what does all this accomplish for the company?
Drilling down to street level, here's what we're talking about:
- Reducing the volume of marketing communication down to what's relevant and interesting to customers, which will keep many fingers off "delete" keys
- Qualifying all sales inquiries, separating tire kickers from legitimate sales prospects to increase sales productivity
- Timing field sales contact to match customer urgency, maximizing sales productivity
- Communicating with customers via their preferred channels, thereby showing your respect for customers, which in turn increases customer loyalty
- Winning business because you know more about the customer than the competition, upping your close ratio and revenues and lowering sales expense
- Winning business by respecting customer's buying cycle and how the customer wants to do business, avoiding the trap that so many overaggressive sellers fall into
- Knowing when you're working with a decision-maker versus a fact-finder, so you can work your way up the buying chain
- Capturing customer intelligence that will guide all manner of activity -- from product development to product mix to balance among marketing communication channels to sales approaches and sales training
- And most relevant, considering the subject at hand, maximizing your ROI on all the money you invest in sales lead generating programs.
We could do a whole page more of this stuff. But the point is, without human involvement, you'll be damn lucky to possess the customer information required to accomplish any of this stuff -- which, in turn, will drastically lower your percentage chances of converting sales inquiries into sales dollars.
The future of lead management is rooted in what people can accomplish that machines can't
Hopefully, now you have a clear picture of the future of lead management. It's about people working with customers and with customer data to extract the full value of customer inquiries that can be cost-effectively realized. Yes, tools such as analytic systems, predictive modeling, CRM apps and the like can all contribute -- sometimes significantly. But it takes people, qualified people, to extract the core value buried in sales inquiries.
And that brings us full circle. Lead management is prominent among the service sectors where technology can support people but not replace them. But that said, many companies -- far too many companies -- will ignore this entire message and continue trying to over-automate the collection of human tasks we call "lead management." The goods news is that they will not be rewarded for their misguided efforts.
About Performark, Inc.
Performark is a Minnesota based company focused exclusively on supporting the B2B
marketplace for the past 25 years. Our process driven approach, passionate people and
technology platforms are the foundation of our core disciplines in marketing database
services, inquiry management, event registration, lead generation, lead nurturing, lead
qualification, and analytics/reporting.
