20+ years
Artist Vincent Van Gogh once said, “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” Just as the artist transforms a series of brush strokes into a painting, so too a sales rep should turn a series of activi
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). Sales Accepted Lead (SAL). Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). Why should you care, as long as the leads are qualified? Right?
It matters more than you think. Of all the leads in your sales funnel, only 3% are active buyers at any given time. Another 7% may be intending to buy shortly. The other 90% are either not yet ready to buy, do not have a need or are not interested in buying from you.
But who falls into what category? Lead qualification can help you make that determination. In turn, a lead—properly qualified—allows your salespeople to focus their efforts where it matters most.
Do your reps faithfully follow up on the leads you generate? If you’re like most marketers, the sad answer is likely a “no.” Why do I say that? Because research shows that salespeople pass over 80% of marketing leads.
You can overcome this with a carrot, not a stick. In other words, you won’t get far by berating salespeople for their lack of follow-up. Instead, it’s better to provide leads they can’t wait to chase down.
Sounds good, you say, but how?
Well, you’ve heard it before, salespeople want leads that have the money and the authority to make a purchase, are looking for a solution to the problem that your product or service solves, and want to take action within the foreseeable future.
But how do you ferret out leads that meet these criteria? It’s not as simple as directly asking someone, for instance, “Do you have the budget to buy this product?”
Here’s a guide to questions you can ask that will help you find the leads your reps will love.
How many connections do your company’s employees have on LinkedIn? How many followers does your LinkedIn company page or Twitter feed have? It’s easy to get excited as these numbers build, but does it really matter?
Yes and no.
It matters because more connections and followers can result in an increased number of leads and ultimately boost revenues. However, the sad reality is there’s no guarantee that social media buzz will transform magically into qualified leads.
So how do you transform online followings and social activity into bottom-line results? You need to integrate your social media marketing initiatives into your lead generation process.
It is possible to have too much of a good thing.
Scarfing up a whole box of chocolates at one time, for instance, might fall into that category. A more work-related example is when the phone starts to ring off the hook. It’s what you always dreamed of, so how could you possibly have too many phone calls? If you can’t keep up with answering them, however, you have too much of a good thing. Another frustrating situation is when leads pour in from your latest e-book, and you can’t respond rapidly enough to the interest you’ve generated.
When you can’t answer your calls or follow up on content downloads, it put the results of your marketing efforts at risk. That’s because you’re 21 times more likely to qualify a lead that you call within five minutes than let response time stretch to 30 minutes. Those statistics are stunning but true. They are based on actual data from six companies within the InsideSales.com system that had followed up on over 15,000 leads with 100,000 call attempts.
It follows that you need to set yourself up for success in response handling. To do so, you need to be capable of taking the following steps.
“Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder,” Mason Cooley, an American writer.
It’s September. We’re almost into the fourth quarter (Q4) and John, the Vice President of Sales, is in a mild panic. It’s not surprising. After all, time’s running out to meet his quota and sales are soft.
How did he get into this position?
When he arrived at work at the beginning of January, he was full of optimism for the New Year and ready to tackle the sales challenges. Ahead of him stretched twelve long months to make it all happen. Plenty of time to fill the pipeline, nurture leads and convert them into sales. Or so he thought.
It seems like this missing link is made of gold. What are these sales lead management teams doing that is multiplying the number of ready-to-buy prospects while cutting marketing costs?
But things didn’t work out that way.
Each month sales fell just a little short. And John thought he could tweak a few things to catch up. It didn’t work. Now, he’s about 5% down year to date. Making up those lost sales in the last quarter will require some heroics.
Does this sound familiar?
Too often glass-half-full leaders fail to take strong actions to get sales back on track until they’re up against the wall. Time, their friend at the beginning of the year, zips along and turns into their enemy. And, as Cooley noted so wisely, procrastination makes hard things become harder.
How to rock sales lead development? The quick answer…put a sales lead management team to work.
That of course, begs the question, “what is a sales lead management team?” It is, unfortunately, often the missing link between sales and marketing. It’s that gap between the two disciplines where leads are lost either because marketing doesn’t qualify them or sales doesn’t follow up on them. Conveniently, marketing points the finger at sales and sales points the finger at marketing.
If only there was a group in between marketing and sales that could take marketing leads and transform them into qualified sales opportunities.
That’s what a sales lead management team does via the phone, email, and more. And a Forrester Research study says that businesses which put a priority on lead qualification and nurturing have 50 percent more sales-ready prospects and reduce their cost-per-lead by 33%.
It seems like this missing link is made of gold. What are these sales lead management teams doing that is multiplying the number of ready-to-buy prospects while cutting marketing costs?
Much attention is paid to the cost per lead in B2B lead generation. However, what’s more important is the cost per sale. After all, that’s the outcome you’re seeking.
Let’s say a company sells technology solutions to operations managers. Its marketing and advertising efforts result in a list of 200 leads that costs it, for the sake of simplicity, $5,000. The company shares these leads with its sales people based on their territories. The sales people follow up and walk away with five closed sales. When you divide five into $5,000, you come up with the cost of $1,000 per sale.
If you follow the “sales is a numbers game” metaphor, you might think the salesperson who makes the most calls or follows up on 100 percent of the leads that cross his or her desk is the victor clutching all the spoils.
Metaphors (and their literary cousins—proverbs and adages) are convenient ways to define situations clearly. But choose the wrong metaphor and you can be headed for trouble. In the case of playing a pure numbers game with marketing leads, you’re probably hovering on the edge of a black hole— and you know that’s a metaphor for disaster.