Dan McDade’s first book, “The Truth About Leads,” just published
By Allan Maurer
Dan McDade thinks lead management processes are broken in most companies and it frustrates him to the point that he wrote a book, published this week, called “The Truth About Leads.”
Dan McDade
“It’s a map to fixing some of the most significant problems,” he says. “They’re not easy to fix.”
A primary problem is the poor communication between sales and marketing departments, he says. “You have people in sales conditioned to expect poor leads from marketing, and marketers think sales people don’t follow up on leads. Sales and marketing in most companies are not nearly as aligned as they should be. Poorly qualified and unfiltered leads go to sales and 90 percent of the time, sales does nothing with them.”
The result? At one point in 2010, more than half of sales organizations missed their quotas.
At the most basic level, they have to agree on what a lead is. “This isn’t getting a lot of people in a room and singing Kumbaya, it’s a CEO making a decision and enforcing it across the company.”
“The Truth About Leads” cover
McDade is president and CEO of PointClear, an Atlanta-based firm founded in 1997. It is a prospect development company that helps B2B companies drive revenue by nurturing leads, engaging contacts and developing prospects until they’re ready to close.
The Sales Lead Management Association named McDade one of the 50 most influential people in sales lead management in 2009 and 2010.
Once a lead is defined properly, the next step is what happens when a lead goes from marketing to sales. That process involves “Control, credit and compensation. You communicate in such a way that people do not feel they are losing control and know they will get credit and it will affect their compensation.”
He adds, “If you work it right, it’s incredibly motivating and you get tremendous results. If you don’t, it’s incredibly demotivating.”
Dan McDade as principal for a day at a Pre-K special needs school
McDade, “an accountant by trade,” was president of several companies prior to founding PointClear. The 57-year-old likes leadership positions. Recently, he volunteered to be principal for a day in the Atlanta school system. He had hoped to be principal at a high school, but ended up in the role at a pre-K school for special needs children.
Even there, he had his eye on organizational efficiency. “I learned what a Principal does,” he tells us. “I greeted cars and helped pull children out of car seats. But you couldn’t tell if a child was special needs or not.”
Out of their cars the children headed to classrooms with names like Blue Frog and Purple Dinosaur. “They went happily and soaked everything up like a sponge. They were well disciplined and curious about having someone visit. I was one of the few men other than the janitor, and I’m 6’4″ and 290.”
He was impressed with the school’s organization. “They’re very structured. The way they’re scheduled and planned was impressive.”
Children were curious about Principal for a day Dan McDade, who is 6’4
For a video on Dan’s inspiration for writing The Truth About Leads, click here.
McDade’s book has been well received by critics and early readers. Here’s an excerpt:
Book Excerpt from The Truth About Leads
By Dan McDade, CEO of PointClear
FINAL WORDS: The 7 Fundamental Truths About Leads
If competing was easier, it would probably not be as much fun. Shortcuts such as setting objectives based on the number and cost of each lead, or creating appearances for sales rather than real opportunities, are well-intentioned examples of decision-making that oversimplify a very difficult process.
This faulty decision-making is often fostered by an environment that is created by senior-level executives, marketing management and sales management. Here are the 7 fundamental truths:
1) Executive and C-level management owns responsibility for providing high level market, message and media strategic direction. If you are a C-level executive today, and have given your team the direction that “our market is the Fortune 500″ or “we sell enterprise solutions” (as examples), then you may be partially responsible for gaps between expectations and actual results.
2) Tight, vertical and geographically defined markets are always necessary. Always. If you do not have a handle on this, from a deployment and message perspective, you are
wasting time and dollars.
3) The strategic-level messaging most companies use does not work. If you cannot explain what you do with a simple story and/or analogy, you need to work harder on carefully crafting just what you need to say.
4) Close to 95 percent of most marketing investment is wasted due to marketing’s focus on short-term leads and failure to value and capture the long-term leads. Also, frequently lost is information about companies that are qualified, but have no immediate opportunity – valuable information that results from the process of finding short-term leads. Gathering market intelligence and applying the learnings in the context of a thoughtfully planned nurturing program delivers significant return.
5) If you have an inside sales group, it is likely that they are either glorified administrators, or making 35 or fewer dials per day due to other pressing issues. That means that for every person you have in inside sales, every day you are settling for 65 percent less productivity than you should. You can’t afford anything less than a dedicated group of trained professionals focused 100 percent on sales.
6) Sales management has six jobs: Hiring, Compensation, Training, Deploying, Managing and Coaching. There are ample resources for the first three, but the secret to more successful sales management is deployment, management and coaching. The best sales rep, with an envious comp plan and great training, will fail if not pointed in the right direction (deployment, including providing true hunters with fully baked sales opportunities) and pushed (managed, including requiring compliance with the needs of the corporation regarding SFA or CRM), and coached as required when things are not going well.
7) An advocate is someone who will, without prompting, speak well of you and your company – and in essence, help you sell. Initiatives to keep customers happy can help you make money. Since buyer’s remorse starts the moment the deal is signed, the activities, events and programs designed to create advocacy need to start then too.
Does your company clog the pipeline with low-level leads created by trade shows, web hits, inbound calls and junior telemarketers? Is your company spending a fortune buying “appointments” that are really “appearances”? If so, you need it to stop.
Now you know the truth about leads.
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