How to use your employees as a great source of high quality leads while reducing leads costs by 90%.

Marketers traditionally spend a significant portion of their marketing budget in campaigns and programs to generate new leads for the business.  This will continue to be a primary source of lead inquiries; however your customers contacts with your employees, can generate high quality with

• a lead conversion rate that is 3 to 5 times higher than traditional marketing campaigns.

• Up to 90% less expensive than your average marketing sources

Over the last 2 years at Avaya, we built a lead program that rewards our technicians and customer care associates to submit qualified leads.

In the first 18 months of the program it has generated:

1. Over 6000 qualified leads
2. With an average conversion rate from initial lead inquiry to qualified lead averaging over 50%.
3. In the spring of 2008 the program was generating over 30% of the qualified enterprise marketing leads
4. At a cost that was 90% less expensive than the average marketing generated lead.

The program was called “Take the Lead” and was targeted to the 3000 Avaya Customer Support associates.  This included the field service technicians, Remote Tech support, Tier 3-4 Engineers and the CARE center agents.   Nearly all of these associates are represented employees of the CWA or IBEW Unions.  We built the program with full participation of the Union leadership as a way to grow the business, generate more work for their members and protect jobs.    

It was a win / win all around.  

1. Avaya generated new revenues and profits,
2. The customers satisfaction increased with better products and solutions,  
3. The associates created more work and job security
4. The Union partnership with the company increased job protection.    

The key factor we negotiated with the Unions was that any work generated from the lead program would be exclusively done by Avaya service associates.  Although Avaya utilizes independent Business Partners to sell its solutions most of them subcontract the installation and maintenance back to Avaya

We would pay for those leads that passed lead qualification for the following products:

1. Enterprise Product Leads
2. SMB product leads
3. New maintenance contracts for SMB or Enterprise products
4. Major Moves and Changes  

If the lead was qualified by the inside sales or the lead Telequalification teams the associates would be paid regardless if we sold it our not.  Our objective was to drive qualified leads, and with the sales cycle exceeding 6 months in some products, we did not want to delay the rewards back to the associates.   We found that the leads has an excellent win rate compared to other lead sources.

The program worked like this.  A technician, who uncovers an opportunity in their day-to-day interaction with their customers, would submit the lead via a web based lead form called a Take the Lead Quality Referral Form.  The form provided us with the key information regarding the prospect, the type of opportunity and the technicians email handle.  Using the web form it allowed us to automatically process the lead in our lead refinery® system.

Utilizing the Avaya B2B Lead Refinery® process, the web lead forms would be downloaded daily and depending upon the type of lead sent to Avaya inside sales via Siebel for all Maintenance contracts, SMB product and Moves and Changes.  For enterprise product leads they were sent to the outsourced Telequalification vendor.   The reporting was based on if the lead was qualified.  In all products the prospect would be called and the opportunity would be qualified or not.  For the non enterprise product leads, the Avaya inside sales team would mark the lead as qualified or not in their Seibel CRM system.   For enterprise leads the Telequalification vendor would call and qualify the lead,  If it was qualified it was routed to the appropriate Avaya sales channel .

We provided visibility to the associates on a Take the Lead website where they could look up the status of their leads in real time.  At the end of the month we would reconcile all of the leads submitted that month and pay the associates via an American Express Persona Debit card.  The range of the payment per lead ranged from $5 to $50 depending on the lead type.   At the end of the month we rewarded top performers including first and second level supervisors on the basis on the number of leads and number of technicians that participated from their teams.

Lead programs in the customer support organization was not a new concept, the problem in the past was that they tended to be local or regional and were not administered on a consistent basis. The net result is programs tended to die out over time and they were difficult to administer.  When we launched TTL  that there was a high level of skepticism when we first rolled this out on a national basis.  

We worked hard to build credibility with the associates that the leads would be followed up, they would be paid accurately and most importantly that all of the work generated would be done by Avaya associates.   We actively managed the emails and calls from the field to follow up on their questions with in 24 hours.

To insure we had compliance with our authorized Business Partners that they would only use Avaya technicians on these leads, we initiated an agreement that they signed agreeing to the terms.  Any violations of this would take them out of the Tech lead program.   In over 18 months we did not have one documented violation of the program.

The program slowly grew in its first 9 months but by the end of the first year we had increased the volume of leads by a factor of 400%.  Over all associate participation also grew month over month.  The highest performing groups were the remote Tech Support and Tier 3 Engineers. Since they were on the phones with customers they had a higher volume of opportunities to work.  Some of the associates were submitting between 20 and 30 qualified leads per month.
 
The Take The Lead program demonstrated clearly that there are alternatives to your traditional lead sources that are much less expensive, with much higher conversion rates.  It was targeted toward our install base and provided excellent up sale and cross sale opportunities generating new revenues at higher margins.

 
Dennis Head
eDemand Leads LLC
303 329 4637
dennishead@edemandleads.com

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