An Interview with one of the "50 Most Influential Sales Lead Management Professionals":
Dan McDade, PointClear, LLC

Company URL

Who are your mentors and why?

What is the most helpful advice you've received to improve your business?

What is the most helpful advice you can give to help others improve their businesses?

How do you give back to the professional community?

What is your favorite business book?

What's your recommendation of the 4 steps?

Which 4 basic skills or process steps do you recommend?

Pay close attention to the most critical elements in sales lead management: Market, Media and Offer.

Market: Most companies market too broadly. An example is an organization that perceives its target market to be the Fortune 500, when in reality it's a smaller audience within that group and most likely some outside it. Know your market, and then target only the highest-return segments.

Media: Leverage a smart mix of media. Use a combination of outbound calling, voicemail, websites, social media, email and direct mail to touch prospects repeatedly over time and maximize results.

Offer: Don't underestimate the need for clear, concise messaging that speaks to buyers' pain points. Carefully document the offer, including problems solved, features/benefits, and competitive differentiators so everyone's on the same page.

In your opinion, the best book on marketing is:

Your reasons for choosing this book are:

What would you say to someone who asks what to do first in managing sales leads?

I would tell them to implement the following critical best practices within their organizations:

• Define your largest effective target market and create a single database of qualified decision makers.
• Manage your contact lists on an ongoing basis to help substantially improve client acquisition.
• Predict high-performing market segments and allocate resources to highest-value targets.
• Identify qualified, long-term prospects and nurture them until they're ready to buy.
• Assign opportunities to resources based on value; provide seamless integration of leads into CRM system.
• ' Optimize potential by monitoring and reporting sales follow-up on high-value opportunities, and results.

If someone wants to nurture sales inquiries what process would you recommend?

I always recommend that companies match marketing and sales activity to the buyer's stage in the process. There are five stages:

1) Find the pain,
2) Get agreement there is pain,
3) Agree to do something about the pain,
4) Agree to a generic solution,
5) Agree to a customized solution.

If marketing is communicating brand benefits before the buyer knows he/she has a problem, the message will not be meaningful. By the same token, if sales is uncovering pain points when the buyer is three steps ahead, looking for a solution, the efforts will be unproductive.

What steps would you suggest to measure the ROI for sales inquiries?

It's necessary to put a process or method in place to close the loop on all inquiries. SFA and CRM solutions are only as good as the data in them, which makes it essential that sales and marketing be held accountable for using them. To do this usually requires changes in compensation to make sure that information input by sales is not limited due to other priorities, is not overridden by pressure to produce results AND, most importantly, that the visibility and overhead associated with everyone having access to prospect information has a positive, not negative, impact on the organization.

To help in the process, it's necessary to audit each lead and report back to sales and marketing on the effectiveness of lead follow up. Reports generated from this auditing are among the most effective tools a company can have to drive revenue.