A few months back I wrote “Lead management done right” with the intent of explaining how companies should approach their CRM and the large quantity of leads and data in their database. The fact is that many companies do not have a structure for this and fail to maximize on their leads.

If sales is the life blood of a company then leads are the oxygen that is being carried. (o.k. maybe a bad analogy, but you get it.) If your sales people are not managing their leads correctly then fewer sales will take place and bad data will dominate your CRM.

By default, if the CRM is being updated by lazy sales people with half data or no data, then marketing will have an even harder time communicating with them. huh…you don’t want marketing communicating to your prospects? You need to stop seeing marketing as the enemy and hold their hands for a moment and let them do what they do best, so you can close more deals. The sad majority of companies do not operate this way and the two departments have no idea what the other is doing and therefore they do nothing together. If you don’t think this is hurting your companies revenue, think again.

In a post by Brian Carroll called ‘Lead Generation meets the Bermuda triangle‘, Brian makes a point that should resonate to both sales executives as well as marketing executives.

A report by the CMO Council and Business Performance Management Forum found that companies could boost their bottom line if marketing and sales could just work together. Out of 800 senior marketing and C-level executives… 7% of respondents said their sales and marketing departments work together effectively.

sales people are not measured by the data in their CRM. In most cases they are responsible for their leads and unless there is some crisis, no one else looks at them in any detail. This is another problem that compounds the issue. There should be some metric in place for the data in the CRM. When I worked for NetSuite, a hosted business solution, there were reports generated by management that would track the movement of leads and checks for the quality of data on a weekly basis. This may sound like a lot, but in reality it did not take much time because after the first few corrections, the quality of data was easy to maintain. You hear that…EASY. There really is no reason sales and marketing management do not hold their people to quality.

Nigel Edelshain of Sales 2.0 goes into more detail on this explaining that there should be compensation for sales people to add and maintain quality data. This is not a bad approach especially if you have a database overwhelmed with bad information. Get your people to clean it up so marketing can help by targeting specific groups and get you more qualified prospects.

If sales people can be convinced that by entering good data into the company’s CRM system, marketing people will help them “blow by” their quota for the year, you will be hard pressed to keep them away from the keyboard!

What do you think?

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