Leads and the Customer Journey

A Transformation in the Sales and Marketing Relationship

It’s all about the leads – or is it?

When talking to sales leaders and their challenges in reaching their number and where marketing can help, “back in the day” their main response was that they did not have enough leads and needed to be at more events. This sparked a conversation on how many leads is enough, how many leads can their team/s actually follow up on, quality versus quantity and does it really make sense to attend every single event where a potential customer may or may not be.

Today, the conversation has taken a different turn. Revenue generation has transformed. Sales leaders are directing their teams to find “champions” in their accounts. Processes of qualification have been put in place to shorten the sales cycle, and the value of “qualifying out” is almost at the same level as “qualifying in”. This transformation resulted in a huge shift in marketing. 

Marketing is no longer a support function organizing events and conferences for lead generation and producing swag with the company logo. Marketing is a business partner in revenue generation, with responsibility and touchpoints throughout the customer journey.

The Customer Journey

In 1985 Chip Bell and Ron Zemke were asked to help a large telephone company find out the reason for their customers’ dissatisfaction. They did this by interviewing customers on their experiences with residential outages and repairs (source) and reported the results of the customer journey to senior management.

Chip Bell’s definition: “A customer journey map identifies the sequence of experiences a customer has with your organization from the time the customer identifies a need until that need has (or has not) been met.” (source) 

Customer journey mapping has since become essential in every business strategy. From a marketing standpoint, the goal is to meet the customer at each step of the journey and provide positive engagement to influence the purchasing decision.

The 5 phases used widely are: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Acquisition and Advocacy

In B2B marketing, especially to large organizations, the customer journey is also multi-faceted. One example is according to the target persona. To keep it simple we can divide the personas into three categories (i) End User (ii) Champion (iii) Executive. Each persona has more, or, less focus at different parts of the journey depending on where engagement with them is needed most. Measuring engagements with the various target personas also helps to collect Account Engagement metrics and gauge them against Propensity to Buy analyses.

Measuring account engagement and propensity to buy levels, is an important factor in shortening the sales cycle by offering an early view to assist deal qualification. It also adds another angle to classical lead flow ratios and supports the quality vs. quantity aspect of lead generation.