Articles by TaraSmith

I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the American Marketing Association’s National Leadership Summit this past weekend. This is an annual conference that brings together participants from every American Marketing Association (AMA) chapter in the United States and Canada to share ideas, discuss what’s working in each chapter, etc. (As you may or may not recall, I am on the Board of the Oregon Chapter.)

Anyway, the Summit kicked off with an outstanding presentation by Merrill Dubrow, president and CEO of MARC Research. The topic was – you guessed it – what it takes to be a leader.

Now, Merrill structured his presentation in a somewhat unoriginal format in that he used the letters of “leadership” to emphasize the qualities he believes make a good leader. However, he spiced it up by making members of the audience try to guess the “correct” adjectives out of a broader list.

Think you can do it? Okay, then select which words out of the following Merrill used to illustrate his point (only one word per letter, folks):

Learn, Laughter, Listen, Long Hours, Loyal
Evolve, Excite, Endurance, Evaluate, Education
Adjust, Attitude, Align, Agitate, Anticipate
Decisions, Dedication, Determination, Daring, Desperation
Exact, Enthusiasm, Execute, Experience, Embrace Change
Reward, Radical, Results, Risk Taker, Rowdy
Set Goals, Supervise, Spirit, Sharing, Satisfy
Heart, Horizon, Happy, Healthy, Hire Well
Industry Knowledge, Independent, Integrity, Insanity, Improvement
Powerful, Playful, Polite, Persevere, People
 
If you picked the following, you and Merrill are on the same page:

Listen
Evaluate
Anticipate
Decisions (as in, a good leader has to make the tough ones)
Enthusiasm
Risk Taker
Set Goals
Hire Well
Integrity
Persevere

Initially, I stumbled on a few of these – for example, is “evaluate” really more important than “evolve”…? And perhaps the A should stand for “accountability” instead of “anticipate.” (If you are wondering why, pick up last month’s issue of Business 2.0 and read the article on accountability/leadership. I don’t think it’s available online yet, otherwise I’d link to it.)

But Merrill made a pretty good case for his choices. Now, I know it’s a little harder to do this without the benefit of Merrill’s presentation, but my question for the students (or any other readers) is: do you agree with his choices?
 
 

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If that statement got your attention, then you are not alone. It certainly captured the attention of the 120 plus attendees at Tuesday’s American Marketing Association luncheon in Portland, Ore. The speaker, Kevin Joyce, CEO of Rubicon Marketing Group, gave a presentation titled “Beyond Lead Generation: The Keys to Lead Nurturing and Measurement” and that’s how he kicked off the discussion.

According to Kevin, that number comes from top analyst group Gartner, who says that “up to 70% of sales leads are not properly leveraged or are completely ignored, thus wasting marketing program dollars.”

Some of the other interesting tidbits from Kevin’s presentation include his thoughts on how to tell if your lead generation, maturation and qualification process isn’t working well:

• No consensus on the source of good leads
• Complaints from Sales about lead quality
• No way to confirm that a sales rep followed up on a lead
• Prospects calling wondering why they received no follow up
• Inability to analyze and target early pipeline suspects
• Little ability to forecast out to the average sales cycle length
• Individual Sales productivity numbers vary wildly
• Unknown Marketing ROI
• Complaints from management that Sales is wasting time on poor opportunities

In terms of steps to improvement, Kevin recommends that Sales and Marketing work together to define the lead management and lead nurturing process, and then come to a clear agreement on the lead hand-off criteria.

According to Kevin, the absolute minimum amount of information needed to hand off a lead to sales is:

• Individual’s full name and title
• Company name and location address
• Estimate of the value of the opportunity
• Business phone number
• Area of interest (i.e., what do they want to do)
• Specific services they may be interested in
• Assigned opportunity tracking code

Kevin went on to say that if possible, leads should also include purchase timeframe and budget…and that in an ideal world, Marketing would even be able to schedule the first appointment for sales reps. Now, you can just imagine the murmurs this caused in a room full of marketers. However, it does bring to mind recent statements by Marqui’s CEO and others about the line between Marketing and Sales becoming blurred.

Any comments on this from the crowd? Is the relationship changing? Should Marketers be more actively involved in the process to the point of even scheduling appointments…?

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