BFF: Marketing & Sales?

My apologies on the use of the modern acronym.  For those who don’t know, “BFF” stands for “Best Friends Forever”.  Now, on with the post…

I was recently re-reading a post from Brian Carroll in his B2B Lead Generation Blog, titled “Collaboration Huddles and 35 Other Ways to Improve Sales and Marketing Teamwork”.  Although I can always grab something useful from Brian’s posts, within his list of 35 I immediately stopped when I read #15:

15. Get the marketing team out in the field with the sales team regularly.

Buckets of Leads

When I hear clients make a statement like “we rely exclusively on pay-per-click to drive leads into the business”, I cringe.   Don’t get me wrong – I am as big a proponent of using pay-per-click SEM for lead generation as anyone else, but it’s the word “exclusively” that frightens me.  The most successful lead generation marketers I know follow some simple rules:

1. They start with identifying the metrics that matter for any lead generation campaign – initial value of a new customer, lifetime value of a new customer, average lead-to-sale conversion rate, target cost per lead, target cost per new customer, etc.
2. They set up the appropriate tracking mechanisms (web analytics, CRM, lead scoring tools, etc.) to ensure that their lead generation campaigns are measurable.
3. They diversify their lead generation sources as much as possible.
4. They test, test, and test again.
5. Based on testing, they refine each campaign tied to each source of lead generation.
6. They test, test, and test again.
7. Based on testing, they narrow down what works and what doesn’t and adjust their lead generation “portfolio” to reflect that.