How to Sell Your Executives on Outsourced Lead Generation
Want to implement marketing and lead generation program that will deliver measureable results? Wondering how to do it can be done? The cost of implementing an effective, measureable lead generation campaign is much more than one may think, let alone even budget for. This is a common problem for many sales and marketing executives looking to gain budget approval to develop their outsourced lead generation programs. What if there was a proven blueprint to help you? This article will reveal four critical success factors and how to take action on them.
In today’s business culture, it can be tough to convince executives to buy into new initiatives. Especially when they have witnessed their competitors and other companies jump on things like “social media marketing” that resulted in failure. The concept –poorly executed - lost any credibility and stifled your chances of getting any additional funding in the future. The problem is that you have numbers and revenue targets to achieve and the status quo in your current lead generation program just won’t cut it. Often the biggest challenge is not an issue of the program but rather how you communicate it to your executives. Here are four critical success factors outlined by Dave Green's post on marketingsherpa blog that will help you sell an effective outsourced lead generation program to your executive team.
Sell The Vision
Sales drives the company. I cannot think of a time when an executive board meeting did not discuss corporate revenues. Outsourced lead generation scales sales organizations; and typically, sales channels are the least scalable part of the go-to-market strategy.
According to CSO Insights, sales representatives spend nearly 20 percent of their time generating leads. Obviously, this is not the most effective use of a sales agent’s valuable time and skills. Unfortunately, however, this has become standard practice in many businesses. This is not surprising in light of the findings in Marketing Sherpa’s 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report that an astonishing 80 percent admitted to sending unqualified leads to their sales team.
How can businesses dealing with these challenges keep their pipelines filled with qualified leads? Many companies are creating a balance by outsourcing their lead generation initiatives so that their sales team can spend more time closing and less time trying to generate and qualify new leads. Even if such a move produced a conservative 10 percent increase in sales productivity, the potential for much greater revenue is obvious.
Action Item: Survey your sales organization to find out how much time they spend looking for leads or spend wasted time chasing after unqualified marketing leads. They may not realize how pervasive the problem is. Then use the information from that survey to estimate the cost of this time to the company and to reveal how much money the company is already spending on “lead generation.” Then team up with your sales leaders to determine what kind of revenue production that additional sales capacity might represent.
Tie the Vision to Corporate Objectives
Often, most marketing executives are so focused on tactical considerations that they fail to see the big financial picture. Each year, their CEO develops a list of strategic objectives. Every smart department head should look at those objectives and position any initiative in that light. For example, if the objective is higher profitability, then show how outsourced lead generation can take cost out of the business. If the objective is revenue growth, then show how outsourced lead generation can contribute to revenue growth.
Action item: After getting a good understanding about what motivates your CEO, you need to match your presentation to what his organizational goals are, whether it’s cost reduction, sales growth, a new product launch, etc. Match his language to your message, whether the context is a new blog or a well-conceived lead nurture strategy.
Under-Promise and Over-Deliver
One of the biggest reasons why most marketing executives have lost credibility with their executive team is that they promise the moon and fail to deliver. Too often, many marketing executives think they need to promise a miracle in order to get funding. That’s crazy thinking. If you follow the steps above to sell the vision and ensure it is tied to corporate objectives, you can soft sell the pilot phase. You need take a lesson from Scotty from Star Trek – he always told Captain Kirk it will take twice as long to fix the engine problems, so when it got done in half the time, he looked like a miracle worker.
Action item: Collaborate with the executive stakeholder(s) about their priorities and success metrics. As best as you can, moderate expectations. Remind everyone of the impact of the buying cycle on revenue production. The buying cycle will elongate the payback. Also, make sure everyone understands the need to test and iterate during the pilot. When working with an outsourced lead generation company keep in mind that they should be able to provide you with some achievable metrics that will help establish achievable expectations.
Provide a Revenue Roadmap
A vision is great, but in order to gain true credibility you need to have a practical plan on how to get from wherever you are today to where you’d like you’re company to be. The problem with so many of the new and flashy marketing tools (Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, etc.) is they fail to show how they are going to directly drive revenue. As a result, most executives cannot clearly see how they are going to achieve the desired return.
Action item: The best way we know of doing this is to sell the way your customers want to buy. This means reverse engineering your ideal customers’ buying processes. Armed with this insight, you can develop lead generation initiatives that can help your prospects to take the right steps and support every stage of that buying process. By doing this, you cannot only build a more efficient lead generation engine, but you will also provide your executives a clear line of sight as to how you plan to generate revenue.
Bottom Line
While every company is different, these four factors are essential to sway executives to buy into your outsourced lead generation initiatives for the long-term success of your organization. Lead generation is a daunting task for many marketing departments, especially with the customer buying process changing so rapidly and new tools and mediums constantly evolving. However, companies can beat the odds by taking the time to understand these changes and work with a creditable outsourced lead generation company to accelerate the path to revenue.
Want to learn more about how to build a lead generation engine that will deliver the greatest results at the lowest cost? Check out this free guide.
The Executives' Guide to Building a Lead Generation Engine
Looking for ways for marketing to show ROI? This guide will help you build a lead generation engine that maps to your customers buying process and delivers maximum measurable ROI. Download our free The Executives' Guide to Building a Lead Generation Engine.