Jim Lovelady leads the Lyris sales team with more than 20 years of experience in enterprise software, SaaS solution sales, and new business development. Here he offers his perspective on what really matters when it comes to cultivating leads – and retaining customers over the long term.

What’s most important in cultivating leads? What practices must a company follow?

One, listening to the voice of the customer. Two, understanding your target audience.  And, three, being relevant in your communication by providing the right content at the right time in the right place.

As critical as listening and being relevant is, a recent report from CSO showed that less than 35 percent of marketers use a lead-scoring program which, when done properly, gives marketers and sales deep insight into what intrigues customers. Is this risky business?

Not only is the lack of a lead-scoring program risky business, it’s a good indicator that you’re wasting valuable marketing dollars on leads that don’t correlate with desired target audience. Of course we want to close leads as quickly as possible, but we want those top-tier, high-volume, real prime opportunities that, if we do the measurements necessary and nurture properly, will lead to a better output overall. So scoring is a necessary discipline to develop successful marketing campaigns and ultimately create more and higher quality sales leads, increased conversion rates and revenue growth.

One thing that’s critical to cultivating leads is a strong alignment between marketing and sales. What are your recommendations to leaders who want to build a better alignment between their departments?

Have crystal clear expectations and objectives and communicate them.  Involve both teams and expect participation. When you include and engage everyone, you get some great ideas. Diversification of information, voices, backgrounds, experiences… all that baked together creates more effective, deeper and richer opportunities for the organization. Also, measure. What gets measured gets done.  Be relentless in the measurement of your goals and achievements. Ultimately, marketing and sales leaders need to ensure that everyone is sharing and contributing in generating the desired results of the organization. 

Equal responsibility for the pipeline is a fairly new expectation. Can you offer insight on the evolution of the relationship between marketing, sales, and pipeline?

Whether we are in marketing or in sales we are all consulting with the customer by articulating the value that we can provide to the customer. We’re all in the position of expressing what we do in a way that will generate interest and opportunities for the company. Marketing creates relevant interactions with the prospect or client. Sales is now taking that foundation and refining the interest to a solution set that provides achievement of the customer’s requirements and objectives.

It’s also about sales enablement. This is the fabric between the two. Our sales team learns from marketing the dialogue that we want to put into our messaging with our prospects and our customers. Marketing works closely with our team to learn and understand the sales process, answering the question, “What do I need to communicate effectively with the customer from the point of introduction to sales close?” Sales enablement guides the entire organization on how to develop solution sets that make sense for each individual customer.

Let’s switch gears and address a bottom-line issue that concerns marketers and sales people. According to the 2011 B2B Marketing Outlook survey from Google, 62 percent of marketers say that customer loyalty dipped in 2010. How can/should marketing and sales balance the need for new customers with the need to retain current customers?

To answer this, I’m going to provide a real example of something we initiated internally at Lyris. One of the things I did to engage our people was to give them commission on a renewal.  We built an engagement model with Client Services that enables the account executives to participate in the dialogue with the customer long term. Typically, the sales person works on the deal, signs the contract and moves on and doesn’t engage with the customer beyond that point. We want our sales people to be part of the ongoing dialogue and to be an asset in the process.

We also established an executive sponsor program where we provide another line of communication for the customer. I can jump in at any given point and participate in the dialogue as we continue to strive to improve our performance, and the customer can understand that there is support from the entire organization.

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Thursday July 14, 2011 10:00 AM Pacific Time / 1:00 PM Eastern Time

About the Author

Jim Lovelady (@JimDLovelady) is Senior VP Of Sales at Lyris.