Brian Carroll, the CEO of InTouch has developed a Lead generation modality map (click here for a larger visual) for complex sales. He says on his blog, "To be successful at generating leads for a complex sale, marketers can’t rely on one specific tactic but rather they need to leverage a portfolio of tactics.  It begins with a mindset that see lead generation as an ongoing conversation–with human beings–that’s both multimodal and iterative. Not just a campaign."

I almost never talk about my marketing effort for my current employer on this blog. But Brian’s modality map highlights a huge disagreement I had with my boss last week. We have an in-house list of close to 30,000 people, developed before I started. The data is dirty and incomplete. I have been begged management to update/upgrade/and expand on our list. It has not happened.

I put together an integrated campaign outline the other day where we’d hit our target audience(s) with email, paper-based direct mail, e-Newsletters, a blog, et al. My boss, the CEO stopped me during the presentation and said, "isn’t defining our target audience the first thing we should do?" I said, "of course, but I can’t segment our list." I can’t do a search in our CRM system and pull just the "C" level executives from this vertical or the "marketing" executive from this audience. I can’t even  develop a campaign based on the size of the firm.

"So you are going to throw everything against the wall and hope it works," was the reply I got. "Yes, actually, that is what I am going to do. This would be why I have been harping on the importance of a better, cleaner, and more detailed list 24/7. I can’t develop a specific message to a specific audience if I can’t identify said audience."

IMHO what Brian’s graphic highlights is how many marketing opportunities we have in 2005. But if we, as marketing people, don’t have the ability to reach a specific audience with a specific message we are actually, "just throwing stuff up against a wall."