Lead Generation

Lead Generation at Siemens Healthcare

By Jean Steckler
Siemens (ADR) enlists service engineers who fix their healthcare equipment to help their sales colleagues. Since Siemens Healthcare sales are very complex, typically taking between 18 months to two years to close, both the quantity and quality of leads contribute a great deal to the company’s bottom line.

Siemens’ service engineers see customers on a regular basis and gain deep insights into the problems the customers experience. As a result, customers rely on their service engineers for    trusted advice.

Lead Generation – Phase I

Service engineers initially communicated leads to sales through episodic emails and spreadsheets. This worked well enough to show sales the value of this sales channel — but to scale, better systems were needed.

Siemens built a web portal to better capture and manage leads from service engineers. Once sales reviewed and accepted a lead, the service engineer would enjoy a $100 reward on a re-loadable debit card for his or her help.

Progress. The service engineers generated more than 3000 leads in the year following the launch of the service web portal — clearly an improvement over the 400 generated in the previous year.

Lead Generation – Phase II

Time to ramp up. The lead capture web portal was opened up to all service staff — all 6,000 of them — who generated a whopping 12,000 leads one year and 16,000 leads the next. Motivation for finding any and all leads was high —  especially since the service engineers’ year end bonus was tied to a minimum quota of leads they individually generated.

However, new problems emerged. The quality of the leads fell, with over 65% being rejected. Sales lost trust in the service engineers and the service engineers were frustrated when sales rejected so many of their leads.

The new, pressing challenge was to increase quality while still encouraging growth.

Lead Generation – Phase III

Lessons Learned: The lead generation system needed to be a closed loop system with the customer in the middle of the process. Before submitting a lead to sales, the service engineer now pre-qualifies the lead by providing  answers to three key assessment questions. And Siemens now only rewards  referring service engineers with the incentive bonus when the lead closes on a contract.

The Gain:

• Reduced the average age of leads from 300 days to 14 days
• Increase in both equipment sales and service sales

Watch Debbie Pryer tell her story first hand on a MarketingSherpa video.