Frantz Group surpassed our company-wide lead goal for calendar Q1 of 2009 despite the challenging economic climate. We delivered 111% of our clients’ goals for the quarter which represented about $40M in pipeline opportunity for them. In addition, we closed nearly $7M in bottom-line revenue for our clients through telesales programs.
The word “lead” has become an unreliable term in our industry. To our clients, a lead is a highly qualified business opportunity that is suitable to be passed to a sales team to work and to close. While each client has unique lead criteria, all clients require us to qualify their leads in at least four dimensions: need (what is the compelling reason driving interest in their products/services; what is the impact if no action is taken), budget (do they have/can they get a budget; what is the process), authority (what is their role in the buying process; who is the decision maker) and timing (when will they make a decision; when will they implement the solution).
“The current economy is challenging,” says Frantz Group Vice-President of Sales and Marketing, Doug Niemeyer. “We addressed those challenges in a number of ways. We worked with our clients to do more focused multi-touch marketing especially email, banner ads and telemarketing around a common message. We further solidified one of our focused approaches, Account Profiling and Key Account Nurturing, as a means to effectively uncover new contacts, key roles and responsibilities as well as understanding new needs and priorities due to the economy, which has helped drive more qualified demand.”
Some additional details regarding our Q1 demand generation results. We had 88 different lead generation campaigns in the market. The most active technologies were business software (ERP, SCM, PLM, CRM, BI) followed by IT Services. The most targeted verticals were cross industry (SMB), manufacturing and healthcare. In addition to the lead generation campaigns, we ran 20 other marketing campaigns during Q1 including telesales, event boosting, data cleanse, market research and account profiling.