CASE STUDIES: FOUR PATHS TO PROCESS MATURITY
To improve the maturity of their lead management process, B2B marketers must cross organizational boundaries, encourage cultural change, and champion new technology to standardize, automate, and streamline lead handling. The path and timeline for process improvement varies by business model, company size, industry, and level of executive commitment, but firms that work at improving their lead management process invariably increase business results.

InQuira’s Lead Development Yields Stellar Lead Closure Rates
Faced with limited resources and long sales cycles, this $20 million, 100+-person provider of enterprise knowledge management, Web self-service, agent-assisted support, and online marketing software focuses its lead management processes on cultivating ready, qualified leads. By attaining a high level of lead management maturity, more than 80% of the deals closed by InQuira’s field sales team originate from leads generated, qualified, and nurtured by an integrated marketing and inside sales team that:

· Determines lead quality based on behavior, not demographics. In 2005, InQuira installed lead nurturing technology from Eloqua and integrated it with its Salesforce.com system. Eloqua’s software helps InQuira gather implicit data — like site visits to high-value content (versus visits to the career page), search engine click-throughs, and registration form submissions — and learn how prospect activity is a better predictor of future lead closure than firmographic criteria like company revenue, industry, or contact title.

· Moved inside sales under the marketing organization. To ensure consistency between campaign messaging and inside sales reps’ follow-up conversations, InQuira shifted telesales positions into an integrated lead development group within marketing and tasked reps with educating and nurturing prospects instead of trying to feed the current month’s deal pipeline. Inside sales staff members use customer response data and problem-solving conversations instead of scripts to engage potential buyers. The result? The firm doubled the number of qualified prospects it sends to sales without increasing the number of inside reps.

· Engages prospects through a well-orchestrated communication plan. To attract new prospects, InQuira executes a sequenced set of communications that maps marketing content to specific business challenges and buying process stage.6 Inside sales reps then work leads that respond by engaging them in solution-specific conversations that leave prospects thinking, “Gee, this company really understands my needs.”

· Automates white paper postings on third-party sites. InQuira eliminates the exchange of unwieldy registrant spreadsheets by integrating prospect registration from co-marketing partner sites directly into its lead capture, scoring, and nurturing system. This tight integration enables InQuira to generate follow-up emails automatically and immediately identify candidates for follow-up. By selectively using technology to integrate a range of programs, InQuira quickly culls the best leads from its content syndication partners while continuing to nurture a healthy flow of warm leads. This approach enables InQuira to turn what is typically a high-volume, lowvalue source into a viable lead channel.