2009 Lead Management Practices Survey Results

by Mark Friedman

Recently Mark Friedman, an interim marketing executive with Cerius Interim Executive Solutions, reached out to hundreds of small to mid-sized companies and asked them to complete a quick survey on their existing sales lead management practices. Here are the 2009 results from over 170 company responses.

1. 58% of the companies do not qualify their marketing inquiries before they are sent to sales.

2. 64.9% of the respondents could not track ROI for their Marketing programs.

3. 44.7% of the companies have no formal process to forecast sales and 24% are still using Excel.

4. 85% of the respondents were not very happy with their current Sales Force Automation (SFA)/ Customer Relationship Management (CRM) environment.

These results indicate that companies still have weaknesses in their sales and marketing areas and are not well positioned to take advantage of the economic recovery. By spending time and resources to improve these critical business areas, companies will be able to increase sales, allocate marketing resources more efficiently and better forecast their sales revenue.

Major Concerns

As you evaluate the way in which you manage your sales leads, which of the following is/are your biggest concern(s)

 The three biggest concerns were: 

1. No Central Prospect/Customer database (22.6%)

2. Unqualified leads being sent to the Sales organization (15.1%) 

3. Inability of companies to track the Return on Investment of their Marketing programs (14.3%.) 

Figure 1: Major Sales Lead Management Concerns (click to enlarge)

"Hope is not a Strategy"

These 3 issues are definitely related and point directly to both organizational inefficiencies as well as process deficiencies. Without a Central Prospect/Customer database to manage their sales and marketing activities, companies operate in the dark about the success of their programs and cannot keep track of the status of their sales deals. And as we will see later, a large portion of the respondents do not have a formal process to forecast sales. This approach can accurately be classified as "Catch as Catch Can" and contributes to an inability to manage for better results. 

Without qualifying leads before they are sent out to sales, companies are operating under less than productive processes plus they minimize the desire of the sales reps to provide feedback regarding the status of the leads. These issues all contribute to an inability to manage the Sales and Marketing function efficiently.

Almost 65% of the responding companies do not track the ROI for each of their marketing companies. 

Figure 2: Does your company track Marketing program ROI?

The oldest cliche in advertising is the Wanamaker one about 50% of the Marketing budget being wasted but not knowing which 50%. In a recent blog posting, it was posited that the only rational reasons for not tracking marketing ROI are the following:

• We don't need a higher marketing ROI - we're rich
  
• We've never thought about it
  
• We don't know how to check it
  
• We were told it wasn't possible
  

Although we didn't get into the reasons why, I don't think I'm going out on a limb by saying that most of the respondents would have selected the last 2 reasons.

Yet in today's marketing environment with the variety of exceptional marketing & sales tools available there is no reason to not know your ROI from your marketing efforts.

A majority of companies (58% of respondents) still do not qualify their sales leads before they send them to their Sales organization.   

Figure 3: Does Your Company Qualify Leads for Sales 

The prevailing attitude appears to be that their Sales people should qualify their own leads. As we have written previously, it is far more productive to have a separate group qualify sales leads and only send qualified prospects to sales. It doesn't matter what department these inquiry qualifiers are in or even if the function is outsourced, what does matter is that sales people need to be kept busy talking to qualified prospects; it is what a company pays them to do. Any administrative task that takes them away from selling is potentially condemning the company to lower sales and profits.

Over 50% of the companies still don't use an automated Sales Force Automation (SFA) and/or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application.

Figure 4: Sales Force Automation Software Used 

 

Figure 5: Sales Force Automation Software Satisfaction 

Companies are not satisfied with their Sales Force Automation/CRM environment. 

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being Extremely Dissatisfied and 10 being Extremely Satisfied, 85% rated their satisfaction at 7 or less and fully 55.9% rate their satisfaction as a 5 or less.

While it is not overly surprising that companies with fewer than 5 Sales reps don't use this type of software (71%), what is quite surprising is that 28.6% of the larger companies do not use SFA software at all. 

Only 11.2% of companies are using a Sales Force Automation program to generate their forecast reports.

Figure 6: Generating Sales Forecast Reports 

Almost half (44.7%) of the respondents indicated they actually have no formal way to create a sales forecast report. Additionally, 30% are using Excel; this approach makes it almost impossible not only to predict the sales that will close in any given month or quarter, but also to track the ROI for any Marketing, as the original Lead Source is seldom associated with the deals that actually do result in sales. 

Again, we have found, and much industry research supports, that companies who do use SFA/CRM are much more productive in their Sales organization and close a higher percentage of their leads than companies that do not use this type of software.

 If you would like to learn more, please click here.

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