I recently had a chance to sit down with Andre Pino, principal analyst for Forrester Research, to discuss lead to revenue management, a solution for overcoming the sales and marketing process gap. In this video, we discussed how a model can help define and manage how a potential customer proceeds through various qualification, opportunity and revenue stages to become an actual customer. The lead to revenue management model is dramatically changing the role of marketing within the organization and enabling businesses to improve revenue performance.
Phil Fernandez: I know you have been talking about lead to revenue management – tell us what that means, and some of the insights you’re starting to see?
Andre Pino: Let’s look at the basic problem that many marketers have today, particularly for any company with a high consideration product. These products require the buyer to go through several stages of education and understanding of the solution of how it’s going to impact them, and how it’s going to help them solve their problems. As a marketer generates leads in that environment, a very small percentage are leads that are ready to buy. If you look at the other end of the spectrum from a sales perspective, the sales organization wants to act on leads that are ready to engage in an active sales process. These leads are that very small percentage that marketing is generating.
When you take a step back and look at marketing generating leads and sales wanting sales ready opportunities, you’ve got this gap in the middle. For a long time it was referred to as ‘the great sales and marketing divide,’ but in reality it’s a process gap. It’s a gap in the processes that help drive the prospect from interest through to a point where they are ready to engage in an active sales process. It is this process gap that marketing has failed to step up to in the past, which is quite honestly their greatest opportunity today.
What we are recommending at Forrester is that organizations establish a lead to revenue model. And, the lead to revenue management model establishes a set of processes, metrics and goals from the early stage of lead generation, all the way to sales close. So the major processes involved in that are lead generation, nurturing and qualification, which fill that process gap that we talked about, and then the sales processes that sales will then own and be responsible for.
For the first time with that model, an organization can see on paper that if we need to hit this revenue target, we need to close this many deals, we have to have this much pipeline to do that, we have to have this number of sales qualified leads, this number of marketing qualified leads, and they can see the whole processes from beginning to end, and see what’s needed to get there.
