We sponsored a webinar put on by Hoover’s yesterday called Fusing Field Marketing and Sales (the archive of the event will be available soon). The main speaker was Tony Jaros of Sirius Decisions, and he talked about the “Demand Creation Ecosystem.” It’s a great overview of the major moving parts that a company’s sales and marketing departments have to address.

Jaros drilled down on several areas. One of these was the “demand waterfall,” which is by no means a new Sirius Decisions framework. They’ve been talking about this for several years (although they seem to have dramatically upgraded their graphic design talent of late!). The waterfall is pretty simple — it’s an effort to drill down into the lead generation/qualification/handoff process:

1. Inquiry — a raw response to an outbound marketing campaign
2. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) — a lead that has been deemed “sales ready” by Marketing (hopefully, with input from Sales as to what determines sales readiness)
3. Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) — a lead that Sales has proactively received; the key here is that it’s a bit naïve to assume that, just because Marketing passed a lead to Sales that Sales actually took that lead and ran with it
4. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) — the “human qualification” component, whereby Sales actually determines if the lead really is a viable opportunity for the company (”SQL” is an unfortunate acronym; methinks that it’s been in use already for a while with an entirely different meaning)

This all makes sense, right? The real benefit is that you can start looking at your conversion from step to step and, if there is a problem, have a much more focussed action plan for addressing it. When it comes to analyzing your processes and tuning them, deconstructing them makes a lot of sense.

What bothered me about this, though, was that, by itself, the waterfall only pays attention to the leads that move through it as you hope all of them do — from inquiry through SQL. What about the leads that do not make it through that process? It’s dangerous to throw them all into a generic “nurturing” bucket. We’ve been doing some work on that front internally (click the image to view a larger version):

It really does depend on where the lead fell out of your ideal process and why when it comes to nurturing them. If, for instance, Sales is unable to make contact with an SAL, then you will likely re-qualify them if they again take actions that make them appear sales ready. On the other hand, if Sales makes contact and then actively rejects the lead as being not qualified, then you need to be careful to not pass them back to Sales a week later when they show up for your next webinar. This is not to say that you will never pass a rejected lead back to Sales — it just means there needs to be a blackout period of some sort whereby the qualification bar is much, much higher for that lead to get passed back to Sales (for instance, if the lead explicitly requests contact with a Salesperson, then he should be handed back to Sales).

On yesterday’s webinar, Jaros tackled the same issue (with a prettier diagram to boot! Click it to view a larger version):

I like the concept of “recycling leads” and, to recycle them effectively, you nurture them.