Selling Through Someone Else: How to Use Agile Sales Networks and Partners to Sell More

Chapter 6

Advanced Strategies for Customer Targeting and Lead Generation

Lan Guan and Golnar Pooya

 

Chapter Summary

• More ways to interact with customers, more business partners, more uncertainty and simply more variables mean more complexity—but staying the same is not an option for companies with a growth plan.
• In an Agile Selling model, a company doesn't have a linear process for its sales and service life cycle. It has a multidirectional network to manage.
• Multiple dimensions are critical for building a leading demand-generation engine including advanced targeting analytics, integration of lead generation and distribution, multichannel process alignment, and strong focus on return on investment (ROI) measurements.

In recent years, many companies have tightened their belts, and few business functions have been squeezed more than marketing. In these “right-size” marketing organizations, customer targeting and lead generation are the most common and serious casualties. This is not surprising, because marketing can have a somewhat esoteric image. In many business-to-business companies, lead times from lead generation to sales conversion can be long, and multiple entities can be involved along the way. As a result, it can be tough to track marketing's role and value in a final sale. Thus, in a selling environment that is increasingly complex, marketing teams are challenged to do more with less, producing more productive leads while reducing the average cost per lead to improve ...