Lead Development Supports Marketing, Sales … and Growth

Someone new to the world of prospect experience asked me recently what it was I did. This individual is with a 35-person professional services firm and wasn’t familiar with our space.

For others in the same position, I’ll share what I told the executive team: 

I founded Prospect-Experience after merging my previous company which I started in 1997 with another company. My new, independent consultancy, Prospect-Experience (PX) was founded on the premise that the customer experience helps you keep customers, but the prospect experience helps you get customers in the first place.

Then and now, lead development’s been my specialty. Lead development is a space that straddles marketing and sales, and the work we do here at PX supports both.

The idea is, traditional marketers aren’t going to pick up the phone and prospect, and salespeople, who are specialists at closing, aren’t really wired to do the phone work either. So … a company needs people responsible for developing leads. 

How? By using the phone not to cold call, but to identify leads and develop them systematically over time. Lead developers are equipped with just the right call flow (not a script), just the right language for voice mails, and just the right words for personalized emails that generate action—all done using a pre-prescribed cadence.

How many calls, how many emails, how many voice mails, across how much time, in what order … it’s all predetermined, tested and tweaked as needed.

Among the first things we do for Prospect-Experience clients (and what I’m working on now for the professional services firm described above) is create a PX Playbook with details specific to their business.

Lead development resources (whether in-house or outsourced, dedicated or not) use the PX Playbook as a reference, and the Prospect-Experience principal (that would be me) provides them a list, trains them, and coaches them as needed. Someone at the client organization is the accountability person. That same person (in the case of this example, the VP of business development) would also be the person the leads, once qualified would be turned over to. (The PX Playbook defines what makes them qualified.)

So for those of you who don’t know me, that’s what I do. After almost 30 years in lead development (plus another 10 in the direct marketing and list management space including at Harry & David and Jackson & Perkins) and a book, The Truth About Leads, under my belt, I’ve learned a thing or two.

Let me know if you’d like to talk further, or need more information about lead development and Prospect-Experience. I look forward to a conversation about the possibilities that await.