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Mike DamphousseNov 14, 2008 12:58:00 PM1 min read

Poker Math and Marketing - Lead Equity

b2b sales leads

I happen to enjoy poker tournaments and am a math geek poker player, which is a different breed. Part of winning in poker is understanding the equity of your hand. I'll bypass all the math and explain it in layman's terms. Basically it is the value of your hand as it relates to the investment you have made in it. I believe this applies to demand gen as well.

Most marketers do not spend enough time looking at the investment they make at each phase of the funnel. They look at stages and lead scoring, but are they looking at the value of a lead and a demand generation/lead nurturing program? As a lead moves through the process, it picks up overall investment value - call it "lead equity" (am I coining a phrase?). My question(s) to marketers is this: there are several techniques, services and sources that will bypass, or I should say, expedite, these higher levels of the lead nurturing process, is each stage of that process increasing the lead equity? Is each investment adding the expected value (EV) at each stage? Is the equity in a lead when it hits your opportunity pipeline higher with one method than another?

Services such as outsourced lead gen, appointment setting, lead brokering, or an inside sales team can provide one lead with high equity versus a hundred leads with little equity. We need to asses the value of the overall investment of each technique to the lead equity. Personally, I see a disproportionate investment in the highest levels of the funnel, which can result in low equity leads.

So back to poker. When we find a technique that provides a higher value than others, go all in!

Continued in part 2

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Mike Damphousse

Mike brings a hard-nosed, pragmatic aspect to category design, baked in from two decades as a company founder, CEO, CMO and sales executive. He understands how companies work and how to take a category plan from concept to implementation.

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