Who Gets The Credit?
This week we Yanks celebrate the anniversary of a famous dinner that happened a few centuries ago on the eastern shore of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But this year there is a bit of trouble brewing between the good people of that eastern shore. Apparently, those that like to celebrate an historic first landing of a certain sailing vessel, named after a vernal bloom, at the location of a famous rock, are all in a tizzy. Their neighbors to the east, who live at the tip of a peninsula named after an over hunted fish, are claiming that the Pilgrims, with their large belt buckle hats, landed in their fine town first.
Now, it is obvious what this is all about, and then again, you have to wonder why. Yes, it could be beneficial for tourism to claim that the Pilgrims officially started things off in your town. But, historians are fairly confident that the first Feast of Thanks happened at the site of what we now know as Plymouth. Nothing is going to change if those turkey celebration wannabees win their argument. If the Mayflower first stopped off in current day Provincetown, refreshed their water tanks and emptied the scuppers, who really cares? We will still end up with a very feeble seaside rock and historical landmark getting all the attention.
This smacks of a similar argument that I often hear between feuding business functions – who gets credit for the lead? I have visited more than one company where the dispute goes something like this. The marketing function performs a lot of effort generating leads and then hands them off to the sales force. Some individuals within the sales team pursue the leads they receive, but they get creative with how they capture these opportunities in their CRM system. According to the paper trail within the technology, they reject the lead from marketing and enter a new opportunity in the system, as if they found the lead themselves.
Unlike the situation going on here in New England regarding the seafarers aboard the Mayflower, it actually does matter where a lead originates. There are two issues at play in this situation.
First, and foremost, it is very important to track what marketing activity generates a lead. More critical is the ability to then connect that lead to the opportunity pursued. If the business is won, we want to then track which types of leads bring more business. Likewise we want to track which types of lead generation activities spawn the best leads. All of this requires that we link all the activities together. When a good lead is pursued and tracked under an opportunity that is not linked to the original lead we don’t have the ability to determine if the money invested in generating that lead is good money spent.
I hear many reasons for why this degenerate lead management activity occurs; mostly the rationale is centered around the thinking that the original lead was bad and the sales person had to do work to actually create an opportunity that was good. I don’t have hard statistics to quote on this, but I suspect this is nonsense.
The second issue to raise is the use of rewards that are in place and how they influence the behavior. I have witnessed many companies that remunerate sales people with a higher commission for deals they find and close versus deals they get handed to them from a marketing lead. On the surface this could make sense, but with a bit of understanding you will see that this too is total nonsense.
The reward causes the bad behavior. If you are investing money in marketing campaigns then you need to do everything you can to ensure those campaigns pay off. Don’t reinforce your sales team to circumvent those marketing investments. And don’t give them an incentive to cheat the system and mask the efforts of your marketing function.
Rather, be thankful for your marketing function. Give them credit when they find a good lead. Let them know when their lead is not good and for what reason. But, don’t break the chain and make it impossible to measure campaign effectiveness. And whatever you do, don’t make your sales folks thankful for the ability to get a lead for free and then turn it into a better deal once they make it their own.
If you visit the Bay State in November, please enjoy all the historical sites, but you may want to make your plans for a Cape Cod visit when the weather is a bit more oriented for a trip to the beach.
Happy Thanksgiving
