The Perishable Lead: Why Don't Good Leads Ever GetRecycled?

At this point in my career, my marketing teams have generated hundreds of thousands of leads thatnever received a call. If sales and marketing alignment had been perfect, these leads could havegenerated billions of dollars of pipeline and many hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Inaddition, these teams have generated more than 100,000 leads that have been followed-up just onetime, often with a single email, voice mail, or phone conversation.

For most organizations, recent leads are an incredibly valuable asset that is inevitablyunderutilized.Why? The fact is that most B2B organizations do not have sophisticated enough leadscoring and routing processes to recycle great leads that, for one reason or another, never turnedinto sales opportunities.

So what does it take to effectively recycle leads?

A sophisticated scoring process: To effectively recycle leads, companies need to score the lead atleast two times. The first score is based on the initial inquiry and the successive score is based ontime-based degradation as well as subsequent prospect engagement. Unfortunately, this is verydifficult to get right. According to Sirius Decisions, "Best-in-class companies define and executetargeted nurture efforts specific to disqualification reasons, product interests, industry and buyerrole. An emerging best practice is to score disqualification reasons and weight responses to nurture-specific offers distinctly from non-nurture actions to recognize progress along a prescribed pathdesigned specifically for reactivating recycled leads."

A multi-pass lead routing process: To effectively recycle leads, you need the ability to present agingleads back to sales for follow-up calls and conversations. To get this right, organizations need to beable to granularly track the initial disposition of the lead and then to re-present the lead to sales atthe appropriate time based on prospect activities or time-based follow-up best practices.

Strong Lead Generation Analysis Capabilities: In most organizations, sales follow-up capability islimited. Smart organizations are able to dynamically prioritize sales follow-up by balancing thequality of the lead, the level of prospect engagement, and the degradation of the opportunityresulting from the passage of time. According to Sirius Decisions, "Best practice organizationsperform deal reviews on recycled leads that progress into active opportunities to determine commonattributes. When observable events are identified (e.g. contract expiration with a competitor),marketers can incorporate them into recycle-specific scoring models."

For many organizations, the first step to lead recycling is to drive second or third contact attemptsto recent leads that have never been reached. Beyond that, organizations typically focus on nurturemarketing programs to recent leads with the hope of driving prospect re-engagement. As CRM andmarketing automation tools continue to improve, smart companies will figure out how to value andprioritize aging leads and to target sales efforts towards the highest value prospects.

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http://scienceofrevenue.com/2012/05/31/the-perishable-lead-why-dont-good-leads-ever-get-recycled/