Leads operate in a no-mans-land between two powerful departments inside banks—sales and marketing. A successful lead curation strategy requires dedicated efforts and collaboration between the sales and marketing personnel.

Are Leads a Sales Function or Marketing Responsibility?

Sadly, leads fall under one of the two in most banks, while it really demands more of an overlap. The marketing function is the think-tank while sales functions as the workhorse. The modern-day lead governance recipe needs data-driven, machine learning-assisted (ML) marketing skills for lead synthesis and effective funnelling, alongside the customer need-gauging and persuasion skills of salesmen for gross conversions.

Sales And Marketing: Proxy Warfare

Owing to fear of missing out amidst carrying the burden of justifying investments in the latest digital tools, sales teams feel obliged to react to every customer action and they set up over-optimistic targets that treat every interaction as an opportunity to sell.

Obsessed with customer-centricity initiatives and the restlessness in putting the best of ML-driven journey analytics into effective use, the marketing unit bombards the customers with high-intensity messages, cooked-up greetings and glorified congratulatory wishes and offers right from the start.

The two, in tandem, end up frustrating the customers to the point where they are left with no choice but to mute the notifications and ignore all communications by the enterprise. I call this “over engagement making way for disengagement.”

The sales approach is mostly reactive and all out, while marketing takes the softer route to a larger base in a proactive manner. The sales team emphasizes quickness while the marketing team advocates accuracy. Sales believes that a larger funnel lays the premise for greater conversions while marketing invests its efforts in curating the right funnel for different products with an equal emphasis on pruning leads deemed a misfit.

Common Foes: Haste And Domain Insensitivity

In today’s tech and data-driven era, it is quite common for professionals to change domains. I often come across people who were running the marketing strategies for an ecommerce company not so long ago that are now driving the strategies for banks. Although less prevalent, I have also come across people who were selling telecom devices a couple of years ago who are now selling investment products.

When people change domains, they also carry forward certain skills from their earlier ones. Add to this the noise created by domain-agnostic-software vendors who sell the same products across different verticals claiming there is little difference between sales in different industries.

Enterprises need to strike the right balance between quickness and correctness when acting on leads and assess them through the lens of their domain.

Consider three different leads in different industries:

• Alice has zeroed in on airpods to purchase (ecommerce). 
• Joe is planning a vacation to the Caribbean (travel and leisure). 
• Zoya is preparing for a sound retirement (banking).

Quickness on the retailers’ part is paramount toward realizing a sale in Alice’s case, while in the latter two, the quality of recommendations takes greater priority. In Zoya’s case, a few additional hours taken to respond back to her is always worth it when choosing the best portfolio for her needs.

Nudge Vs. Nurture:

• A nudge is when an enterprise steers users toward where they possibly were already headed to—just more rapidly.

• Nurturing is a commitment shown by enterprises by guiding users to a state (portfolio, assets) deemed to be the correct one, taking their long-term purposes and strategic needs into consideration. It may get them to a new place or a place they are aware of, but never thought of getting to.

While nudging works in all domains, banks hold an edge when it comes to nurturing. Banks should have a clear strategy on which leads to nudge and which ones to nurture. Merely yielding a conversion on leads could have counted as success in the past, but not in today’s ML-driven, strategic lead governance era.

How Banks Can Unscramble the Lead Governance Puzzle?

To start with, banks should consider two things:

• They are lagging behind other verticals like ecommerce when tapping into leads.
• Blindly emulating the strategies in those domains will not yield the desired results.

They need to go deeper and understand why other verticals have fared better at lead management. They can:

• Carve out lead management as a first-class function, giving it a clear mandate—responsibility and accountability for lead synthesis, lead curation, lead funnelling across different products and lead conversions.
• Tap into the synergies of sales and marketing functions and allow the lead governance function to operate as a tactical unit, availing marketing for lead synthesis, scoring and data-driven analysis and the sales team’s conversions. This allows them then to meet the organizational targets and make the final contact with a customer to pursue the actual sale.
• Tap into the strengths of both CRM and marketing automation tools. Leverage case management and sales incentivization techniques from the CRM alongside advanced sampling, A/B testing and ML-assisted, journey-aware, life-cycle campaigns for marketing automation.

Banks need to realize that they have greater headwinds than other verticals like Telecom or ecommerce when it comes to digital literacy, but at the same time, they also enjoy greater levels of de-facto trust and long-term commitments from their customers.

A new lead is the initial instance of the customer (knowingly or unknowingly) stating their needs to the enterprise. They are also the best opportunities for banks to reinforce trust without adopting an intrusive marketing or sales strategy. Lead governance deserves strategic importance, but it has always stayed in the shadow of either sales or marketing. It is high time for banks to correct the past mistakes and give lead governance the stature and focus it deserves.

This article was originally published here.