Developing a Management
Strategy and Setting Goals

Developing a good lead-generation management strategy begins with setting goals for your organization. Your goals tell you what you (and your organization) hope to achieve. Your goals should define how much you wish to increase your lead-generation efforts, by when, and at what cost. By measuring your lead-generation results against these goals, you can tell how well you’ve succeeded and where you need to improve.

It’s amazing to me how many marketing organizations don’t set goals for their lead-generation efforts. They plunge into lead-generation marketing campaigns with no idea of what they’re shooting for, how many leads they’re trying to bring in, or what level of cost-effectiveness they need to observe. When their campaign is over, they have no idea how well their lead-generation efforts have worked or how well specific tactics are working to provide them with the leads they need. They have no idea if they’ve really provided a positive ROMI to their company. Often, they’ve gone over budget or executed a campaign that has provided them with a minimal number of actionable leads.

Overall, your goal for lead-generation marketing should be to use as many tactics as possible to your advantage. In defining your lead-generation management strategy, you should focus your goals on three areas:

Now let’s take a very quick look at each of these types of goals.

MEETING OR EXCEEDING YOUR LEAD QUOTAS

When it comes to the numbers of leads you wish to obtain, your goals should be very general. It’s impossible to predict the exact number of leads that you will get from using any given lead-generation tactic or any combination of tactics. You can’t say, “My goal is to get 1,000 leads per month from e-mail marketing and 2,000 leads per month from search engine marketing.” That’s like saying, “I’ll plant 1,000 corn seeds and get exactly 10,000 ears of corn this summer.”

However, if you’re working in an organization that has a sales team, chances are that your marketing department is required to deliver a certain quota of leads to them each month. You might want to set goals according to that quota. For example, if the quota is 2,000 leads per month, and your marketing team is producing only about 1,500 leads per month, you’re perceived as underperforming. You might set a goal to get the monthly number of leads your department delivers up to 2,000 per month within three months, and to keep it at 2,000 per month for the rest of the year.

If your marketing team is performing at quota (e.g., 2,000 leads per month) but you think you can do better, you might set your goal to exceed the quota. For example, you might set a goal for your department to deliver 3,000 leads per month, and to meet this new goal within three months. Exceeding your monthly quota will provide recognition for you and your marketing team and will also help your organization to move into a state of growth.

How do you accomplish the goal of increasing the number of leads you deliver? You do it by adopting new lead-generation tactics and/or using your current tactics more effectively. The strategies and tools I provide in this book will show you how to do this.

USING THE BEST-QUALITY TACTICS

To help you meet your lead quotas, you should concentrate your marketing efforts on using lead-generation tactics that provide your organization with the largest number of high-quality leads.

How do you identify the best-quality tactics for your organization? You test tactics against each other, and compare their results. I’ll show you how to do this a little later in this chapter.

USING THE MOST COST-EFFECTIVE TACTICS

In addition to using tactics to obtain the most actionable leads, your goal should be to use tactics that are the most cost-effective for your organization. In Chapter 5, I’ll talk about how to determine your cost-per-lead (CPL) and other measurements you should use to test and measure the cost-effectiveness of your lead-generation tactics.

Again, you will need to test tactics against one another to find out which are the most cost-effective for you. I’ll talk about comparing and testing tactics against each other shortly. First, let’s take a look at how you go about adopting new lead-generation tactics that your organization may not have used before.