The Pontiflex Blog

Field dispatch: Notes from a Sales Director

August 27, 2009 at 12:18 pm Arun Krishnan Leave a comment

Since joining Pontiflex a few months ago, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with marketing teams about their advertising objectives. In every conversation I always look forward to the “light bulb” moment –the moment when I understand a client’s goals and can see clearly the gap between where they are and where they want to be. The figuring out of “what half is working” is of paramount importance in all advertising campaigns and especially when launching a meaningful (and profitable) lead generation campaign.

There’s a longstanding way of “doing lead-gen” in our industry — money, time, and effort goes in, and leads come out. All leads. A lot of them. I’ve talked with marketing teams that have tried many separate partners to make lead generation successful and are managing anywhere from 1 to 10+ separate partner relationships (and contracts, pricing, set-up, and data transfer systems for each). The time they are devoting to this effort is astounding but what has been most shocking, given the money and effort put into these campaigns, is that most clients have little or no insight into their own campaigns!

I’ve found that often times, advertisers don’t know where their offers are being placed and consequently how their brand is being impacted by these placements. Further, logic tells me that if an advertiser doesn’t know where their ads are running, they certainly are not tracking quality by source and it’s therefore impossible to optimize, and make effective, a lead generation campaign. Most advertisers are essentially flying blind without any control over the associations they are making and the quality coming into their marketing funnel; worse, they have been told that this is how “lead gen” is done.

Good news: a new day is dawning.

What you put into something – whether it’s a cake, a workout, or a lead generation campaign – will affect what comes out. The secret to a successful lead generation campaign is:

• Transparency: Know where your offers are being presented to prospective customers.
• Openness: Have the ability to connect to the entire CPL marketplace so you can easily test new lead sources.
• Detailed Reporting: So you know where leads are coming from and performance by publisher.
• Optimization: Ramp up what’s working, cut out what isn’t.
• Communication: Your potential customers have raised their hands and asked to receive information from you- do it quickly via real time data transfer and make it compelling. Think about what will engage your prospective customer.

Transparency and tracking by publisher is the foundation of a campaign, setting up real time data transfer and a real time auto-responder fortifies that foundation. Data transfer set up should be easy, adding new partners, removing others should be as easy as clicking your mouse.

Ask for these elements in your next lead generation campaign; your CPL advertising partner should know and be offering you all of this. If not, call us – we’d love to help.

Stephanie Sprangers, Director, National Accounts

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