Why is the person who manages sales leads so valuable?

Claims come from telemarketers, fulfillment pros, marketing automation and CRM firms, SEO consultants, direct and email marketers, website creators, and any company that counts and processes prospect names that they are sales lead management companies.  And to a small degree, they are right.  Some even say they totally manage sales leads.  But that is misleading.

If a company in some way touches an inquiry on its way to becoming a sales lead, they are in the business of managing a portion of the process… but they are not the whole process.  No one, absolutely no one, is in the entire business of managing sales leads from cradle to grave.  Maybe SalesForce is close, with their three “Clouds,” but they have not yet achieved total control because their marketing automation capabilities are still limited (some say non-existent).

The only person who can say that he or she is in the total sales lead management business is the person managing all of the separate silos; and not many people can make that claim. The problem is that responsibility is spread out among many co-equals desperately trying to do their part of the job, but few of them control the total wealth-building process of managing sales leads. 

If no one person is in charge, you can bet that no one person is responsible.  And without responsibility there is no accountability, and without accountability, no one can prove that the 3-20% of a company’s revenues spent on demand generation is worth it.     The money is lost, unaccountable, squandered, unexploited, misused, untapped, and not followed up on by someone in Sales 75-90% of the time. 

Only leadership can connect the silos.
Only a sales lead management leader can connect lead generation to the acquisition of the inquiry through the dozens of inbound portals into the CRM system, distribute the inquiry (unless of course you only distribute sales-ready leads), nurture the inquiry until it becomes sales ready (through email, mail and telemarketing), all while fulfilling the original request for information and trying not to over-deliver on content and irritate the crap out of the prospect.   And oh yes, prove the marketing ROI.  Sometimes this person is the VP of Marketing; most often it is a communications manager toiling away with little recognition in the bowels of the company.

The leader who can do this should be compensated more than anyone in the company, because this person creates more wealth than anyone next to the VP of Sales and the CEO.  And I’m not exactly sure about the last two.

Comments

[Dandade]

I don't know if I agree with discounting the value of a CEO or VP Sales, but I agree that there is little accountability from one end of the marketing and sales process (or buyer's journey if you want to be politically correct these days). I suggest one person should be responsible - because no one ever builds a statue to a committee. That one person may be the CEO because almost nothing is as important as marketing and sales efficiency and effectiveness.

[JonnyBird]

Piggy backing off of Dan's comment about efficiency and effectiveness. The sales operations manager is becoming more and more important. He/she is in the trenches, working with marketing and sales...especially as we see that line blur more and more as time goes on. Here is an interview we did with sales operations manager, Joe Hamlet of SendGrid. Pretty insightful info.

http://salesloft.com/Hire-Sales-Operations-Manager

Great article.