Let’s continue with the marketing-themed Tuesday posts. We have discussed Gen X & Y on this blog and we have published articles on how to hire them.

Marketingprofs.com pens an article today – A Holistic Approach to Marketing to Baby Boomers – that looks at the largest generational group. Seems silly now, but we have conveniently ignored the boomers in our posts. Let me give you one reason why we shouldn’t ignore them:

An American turns 50 every seven seconds.

Staggering. I am intrigued by this point from the article:

Although boomers are veering away from rocking chairs, research shows the desire for achieving a balanced life as they age. As a result, the definition of work is changing as boomers start to move toward traditional retirement ages in their careers. Trends show that new, part-time, and modified careers are all on the table along with the need for continuous skill refinement and new learning.

That commentary could be made of the X and Y generations and their striving for work-life balance. Interesting how the Baby Boomers, long considered a workaholic generation, are now striving for a similar goal.

Productivity improvements alone will not be able to replace the boomers in the workplace. In the very near future, this older generation will need to be an option for many companies looking to fill open positions.

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Since our topic du jour seems to be lead generation, here is a very quick read from Sales&Marketing Magazine about how to handle leads once you receive them. Nothing revolutionary in the approach, but the author’s point is accurate – salespeople prefer to work only hot leads and ignore the warm to cool ones.

The best sales management approach we have seen is to categorize the leads. That can be A, B or C or some other manner. The frequency of contact and focus of time needs to be defined for each level of lead. The A leads are obviously the priority, B is second and C is last. Simple, I know, but you would be surprised how few companies categorize their leads.

Oh, and a sales manager threatening to shut off the leads to a salesperson until they work the ones they have…very motivating for the salesperson.

Not that I know from personal experience.

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The title of this post is an age-old battle much like lions and hyenas, isn’t it? Brian Carroll has an interesting post on his B2B Lead Generation Blog – Optimizing Lead Generation – What’s the Payback?

The dilemma he addresses is where should executives invest resources – in more salespeople or into lead generation programs. I suspect many executives view salespeople as lead generation programs.

Granted, some salespeople are relentless prospectors who generate many new leads. This style usually comes at price, that is, their ability to retain customers is usually degraded. A strong hunter normally requires a back-end support team since they tend to move on to the next prospect. This fact of life seems to escape many hiring companies.

Brian references an interesting white paper:

Among other things, CSO Insights data from 1,275 companies shows that those excelling in lead generation gain the following advantages over companies that do not:

Win rates are 7 percent higher

Number of sales representatives making quota is 9.3 percent higher

Conversion rate from leads to first calls is 16.5 percent higher

More than 10 percent decrease in ramp up time for new sales people

I was surprised by the last bullet. One of our tasks is to help new salespeople ramp quickly in their new sales position. Shaving 10% from that ramp to revenue time would have an immediate impact on any company’s bottom line.

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