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Life science and high-tech marketer Sigma-Aldrich has doubled the size of its sales force in the last 18 months. Understandably, the company needed a way to get qualified leads to its more than 300 representatives in 34 countries.

Sigma-Aldrich embarked on a lead-management initiative last March, which will be fully implemented in the second quarter of this year. Leads come from numerous sources, including traditional direct response, online and trade shows. Worldwide, the company has about 60,000 accounts and 1 million end users. The top 20% of the customer base is sold to by the company's sales force, while the remainder is contacted through direct response channels, including catalogs (a million copies are mailed annually) and a Web site that pulls in 25% of sales worldwide.

Direct recently talked with Cliff Langston, director of marketing services for St. Louis-based Sigma-Aldrich, about how the company is building a lead-management strategy on the base of its B-to-B catalog foundation. Prior to joining the $1.3 billion firm in 1999, Langston was in the agency world, first with JKL Marketing and then with Dimac Direct. When he came to Sigma-Aldrich he had no scientific background. “But I've just been fascinated by the business of science,” he said. “I'll never truly understand the science of science, but the business of science is very exciting and it has parallels to direct marketing.”

Sigma-Aldrich markets 85,000 products — including life science reagents, biochemicals, organic chemical products and research equipment — primarily to academic researchers, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and government agencies. The variety of audiences can be challenging, said Langston. “We continue to get better at understanding what those customers look like and the things that are important to them.”

DIRECT: Why was it important for the company to have a global lead-management program?

LANGSTON: In the last five years we've beefed up the sales force. We probably have about 50% more reps now than we did a year and a half ago. It's almost an obligation, I feel, from a marketing organization perspective, to provide them with opportunities. Marketing and other vehicles can generate leads, but the sales force is the one tool that can close a high-dollar sale in the field. So we need to leverage that field presence.

DIRECT: How did you go about getting the program started?

LANGSTON: I was part of a team that conducted a strategic plan review process. We looked at sales and marketing in great detail and came away from that project with recommendations for our CEO and board. Lead management was one of the things we considered. It became obvious, as [we] invested in response-generating activities, and the sales force started to grow. [We needed to see] if we could fill the gap between customers and the respondents raising their hands and the feet on the street. Then we got upper management's attention. Lead management is a pretty easy story to tell. We have a process-improvement-driven culture. Lead management was an area where we could try different things to improve and deliver — [after all], as direct marketers, ROI has always been in our bag. When we started the lead-management project, B-to-B consultant Mac McIntosh worked with us to provide knowledge outside the scientific marketplace, and confirm that the concept made sense for our company.

DIRECT: Did you get any resistance from upper management?

LANGSTON: No. Believe it or not, our CEO, CFO and the business unit presidents were very receptive to this. I think we're just taking the typical B-to-B catalog model that we've built this company on and overlaying it on a go-to-market strategy that includes some more high-tech applications, more consultative selling and a larger sales force. If you strip everything away it's still direct marketing, migrating from a typical catalog model. We had to have numbers and data, but once we could put that black-and-white equation on the table, they were very interested and supportive.

DIRECT: What are the challenges in marketing to a scientific marketplace? Do you have a large academic customer base?

LANGSTON: A lot of academics and a lot of very intellectual, smart people. A colleague of mine who is a Ph.D. and also an MBA — a very astute business thinker, as well as an accomplished scientist — coined the phrase T to T, as in “technical to technical.” Any message has to contain credible scientific knowledge and information. You have to establish that credibility. We have a very strong brand that helps us do that, just by name recognition, but [we need to keep] in mind that this person who may be a nationally acclaimed scientific researcher is also a human being who goes through the same buy-cycle psychological process that we do when we buy something at the grocery store. The challenge is bringing these two pieces together and having the right level of technical information but not, as we say, ‘throwing up’ scientific data on them.

DIRECT: Is it sometimes difficult to find the right person in a given organization to contact?

LANGSTON: I think it always is. But in our case, that's where [marketing] 85,000 products works in our favor. If we're going in with a specific product or application proposition, it probably follows the B-to-B model of hunting until you find that right person. But because of the breadth of product lines we have, we can almost always start a conversation with whoever we get in touch with. We may find it can only go to a certain point because of that person's role, or whatever, but that's where the [range] of products makes it easier to initiate that dialogue. Then we need to be profiling that person, if you will, from the time they open their mouth.

DIRECT: How do you judge the ROI of the lead-management program?

LANGSTON: Ultimately it will be judged by sales. But [given] the dynamics of the whole buying process, we may have conversations with end users and [then] final sales may come through contracts or corporate procurement offices. So [tracking] that lead to the close is difficult. We're beginning to build measures around the sales pipeline and [determine] the value of our qualified leads. So far, on a test scale, that has been effective, because it gives a midterm measure. We're able to work it forward and backward to gauge the effectiveness of the marketing campaign, the lead-management efforts, the scoring, etc. On the other end, the sales management group can look at that pipeline and close ratios, average dollar per sale, things like that. We're really just building the foundation right now.

DIRECT: How many catalogs do you distribute annually?

LANGSTON: It rotates. We have four flagship catalogs and four application-specific catalogs that drop on a biannual rotation, with an average page count of 2,500. About 1.5 million are distributed each year.

DIRECT: Are any of the catalogs very specialized, or do they cover a wide range of products?

LANGSTON: Actually both. Our flagship brands Sigma and Aldrich are much more A to Z product listings. [Then in] our supporting catalogs [it gets more specific]. For example, we have a life science catalog that takes many of the products that are also listed in the Sigma catalog and provides them in an expanded nature with application information, protocols and technical direction. We do the same thing in the areas of cell signaling and our analytical product line.

DIRECT: What are some of your other direct mail initiatives?

LANGSTON: We do traditional self-mailer letter packages. We also mail a number of quarterly newsletters that really sit between the catalogs and [other] direct mail, including a life science quarterly and an organic chemistry quarterly. We use these newsletters not only for providing valuable technical information but [to encourage customers to] inquire back if there are specific products they're interested in.

DIRECT: Do you see the newsletters as CRM tools?

LANGSTON: If you're talking about a means to maintain a dialogue with your customers outside the transactional environment or outside focused lead-generation activities, very much so. They're chock full of technical information that can really help our researchers in their work. But our philosophy from the top down is that the traditional ‘big bang’ approach to CRM is not consistent with our corporate vision. Instead of a large investment in people, process and dollars, we've found we can deliver a better customer experience by focusing on smaller, more pragmatic pieces of the puzzle, such as improved lead management, enhanced Web content and e-commerce.