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“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.”

Victor Hugo

Last time I was talking about what I see as a widespread shift in the B2B marketplace from ‘selling to leads’ towards ‘nurturing contacts’.  Today, in part 2 of 3, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on what makes a ‘lead’ distinct from a ‘contact’, and how this functions in practice. (If you missed the preceding part, you can read it here: Norm’s 118leadgenblog – The sad yet inevitable demise of conventional lead generation – part 1).

All the evidence suggests that in 2009 the vast majority of business buyers prefer to be kept informed on their own terms rather than be actively ‘sold’ to, especially when it comes to complex B2B sales cycles.

So what’s the difference between a ‘lead’ and a ‘contact’?

Almost everyone involved in sales and marketing will have a strong opinion on this one. It’s a point I’ve touched upon on more than one occasion, and not without cause, because in my experience confusion and disagreements about the definition, quality and quantity of sales leads is the number one cause of tension between sales people and their marketing teams or managers.

Lead; contact; suspect; prospect: are they all one and the same or a world apart? A problem with such terms is that they mean different things to different people.

For some, leads are simply raw names on a database; for others they represent something more concrete, such as previous customers, newsletter or blog sign-ups, or someone who demonstrates interest as a result of a cold call, email or sales letter.

So how would I go about differentiating the two? If pressed, I would argue that a lead is a person who has expressed a strong degree of interest in a product, either as a result of interruption based marketing, or by responding to an ad, pay-per-click, organic search, blog or newsletter subscription, Twitter post, etc, who may have taken an interest in your business or market. They could also be existing customers.

The desired outcome of a lead is to end up with a pre-qualified appointment, which in turn results in a sale. Traditionally lead generation is a numbers game: if you contact enough people, inevitably a predicable number of them will show an interest and a further predictable number will convert into sales.

A contact, on the other hand, is nurtured over a period of time – inevitably permission based – and is provided with valuable information and insight followed by ongoing dialogue. They might have come to you via the same source as a ‘lead’, but perhaps their need is less immediate, or they’re holding their cards close to their chest:

• A lead requires a campaign. A contact requires a conversation
• A lead can go nowhere. A contact can last a lifetime
• Lead generation is typically reactive. Contact nurturing is ongoing
• Leads are focused on short-term goals: phone call – meeting – sale – move on.  Contacts are nurtured over a period of months and years, with the aim of forming a relationship based on confidence and trust
• Leads typically derive from a small number of sources and are poorly organised. Contacts can come from a diversity of sources and are housed and organised in a database /CRM system
• A lead is a short-term cost.  A contact is a long-term investment

Both strategies are aimed at generating sales, but one is more scientific than the other. The endgame is the same, but via a dramatically different route.

Your ultimate aim is to convert a steady stream of contacts from your ever-expanding database via a rich content-related programme, including blogs, whitepapers, e-books, newsletters, articles, tutorials, etc.  This is not to say that you reject outbound marketing altogether; it’s just that the emphasis shifts to deliver an integrated mix of outbound and inbound, in which the two methods complement and feed off one another.

The trick is to nurture both forms of prospect, while over a period of time shifting the emphasis to rapid database expansion, CRM and lead nurturing: traditional marketing underpinned by a relationship marketing approach.

Thanks for reading. I’ll conclude next time in part three with some tried and tested strategies for implementing your new marketing mix. Your comments and questions are always welcome.

And always to a higher response!

Norman

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