The CMO’s Key to Return on Marketing Investment: Persona Driven Lead Generation

The number one way to demonstrate Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) is by driving revenue through Lead Generation. However, few CMOs are driving top-line revenue growth with their lead generation activity. The problem? It is in the statement. Activity. Activity does not equal results.

Download the Lead Classification Workbook to identify attributes to classify leads into zones, pin-point where your leads are now, and start to evaluate your lead management practices and KPIs based on today’s leads.

Before you get started, answer these 4 questions:

1. What does your sales team have to say about the leads you are generating?

    

2. What does your sales team have to say about the personas and Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) you’ve collectively determined?

    

3. How is your marketing team prioritizing leads? And your sales team?

    

4. How are you relating lead generation activities to your personas?

    

If you do not have absolute clarity and alignment on these questions you cannot effectively generate leads. Conversely, answer these questions with thorough confidence and your organization has the potential to generate massive Marketing returns.

For today’s blog we will focus on how to drive your lead generation efforts off your personas. This will help your organization prioritize, execute and convert to maximize ROMI.

Here is a quick visual to transition from concept into action:

Given it is football season, lets focus on the 3 zones: Red, Green, No-Go.

The Red Zone

This is where you want to focus your lead generation efforts. You’ve drafted your personas. You know who your Ideal Customer is. You are fully aligned with your sales organization.

The first step is to revise your lead definitions to hone in on personas that have the highest propensity to convert. This means you will need to classify all leads by persona and build out a set of lead attributes that support the classification.

Pro Tip: You might consider gaining insight from the sales team as you identify such attributes.

The second step is to re-activate your lead management efforts based on the four categories (A, B, C, D). As a general rule of thumb approximately 70% of your lead management time and effort should be spent on the red zone. That means you will spend the majority of your lead management time engaging each lead, nurturing them, and driving them from MCL to MQL. You will need to evaluate your practices and content to make sure it is stage appropriate depending on where the buyer is in their journey and how they play a role during the buying process. While there is much to consider, start simple and focus on the greatest gains – after all, you know how your leads breakdown based on the definitions exercise from your first step.

The third step for your red zone leads is to measure the outcomes. This not only involves MCL to MQL conversion, but downstream conversion to SQL, Opportunity and Deals won. In addition, it will be important to balance volume with conversion to help Sales make the number.

As part of your continuous improvement efforts, you will revisit:

• Personas
• Lead definition and attributes
• Lead management
• Lead generation measurement

   

The Green Zone

The Green Zone is worth spending time on, as there will be situations where you don’t know enough about the lead to a) classify as red zone or b) eliminate from your lead pool. What is important is that your lead definition accurately identifies each green zone lead as a potential red zone lead, and you know what is missing.

This awareness sets up your lead management to drive towards what is missing, with the intent to classify them into red zone leads. Approximately 30% of your lead management time and effort should be spent on the green zone.

From there, you’ll measure the effectiveness of your green zone effort, including how much gets reclassified to the red zone and what falls into the no-go zone.

The No-Go Zone

Stop wasting time here. Measure yourself on avoiding wasted time and effort. Great CMOs spend little time on this zone.

Committing to the New Approach and Getting Started

Sometimes the hardest part is breaking old habits. Do it with conviction and never look back. I’ve included the “Lead Classification Workbook” to get you started with classifying leads into zones.

In conclusion, get started today. Balance value over volume. Align your end-to-end lead management with the red and green zone. And finally, with the right metrics/KPIs, double-down on high conversion/opportunistic lead types to maximize ROMI.

Related articles and videos:

• Mitel CMO Martyn Etherington Discusses Leveraging Buyer Personas

   

• Cory Jones, VP of Marketing at Frontier Communications, on Lead Generation

   

• Do Your Buyer Personas Need a Facelift?

   

Download the Lead Classification Workbook to identify attributes to classify leads into zones, pin-point where your leads are now, and start to evaluate your lead management practices and KPIs based on today’s leads.

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