Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Keep Going Marketing! Those Leads Are Not Ready For Sales Yet!

  

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One of the more common objections I hear while selling our services is, “We run marketing campaigns that produce leads that go directly to the sales team so we don’t really need a telesales team.” I agree that everyone should have a well thought out marketing plan that produces MQLs, but I do not agree with sending those leads directly to sales. For most companies, it is not the ideal way to develop new clients.

The standard reasoning says that the more leads marketing finds, the better chance you have at producing a higher sales number. The reality is that often times marketing programs are not discriminatory enough and produce too many leads leaving sales swamped with trying to both qualify and close deals. While finding 1000 leads from a campaign looks great to marketing, it's a needle in a haystack for sales to now have to call1000 of those leads to hopefully find a couple opportunities. This is one of the largest disconnects between sales and marketing as marketing says, “we sent sales a ton of leads and they didn't follow up”, and sales comes back with, “because you sent us a ton of sh*t”. 

So my suggestion is adding in another layer of filtering in order to narrow down the number of leads to a manageable number of highly qualified leads. You really have one of two options, either set up a lead scoring program that values MQLs based on customized behavior patterns that you determine make a qualified sales opportunity, or set up an inside sales team to call through the pile of hay and find those needles.

I of course believe the best thing to do is to put together an inside sales process to qualify the prospects that have a high likely hood of buying and disqualify the prospects that have a high likelihood of wasting your sales team’s time. In my opinion this is still the highest ROI yielding and most predictable way to build forecast and sales. It also has several side benefits such as market intelligence gathering, establishing market presence, and competitive landscape discovery, which are much more difficult to gather through alternative methods.

If you do not want to establish an inside sales team (or use an awesome outsourced service), you need to set up an automated marketing program that you can customize to identify personas that are most likely to purchase. Once a prospect hits all the criteria, they should go to sales. These criteria may tighten or loosen up depending on how busy your sales reps are from quarter to quarter. I know a lot of people that use automated marketing tools and then do nothing but follow traffic on them. It’s like buying a bazooka to hunt quail. 

A huge list of inbound marketing leads does not mean that you will have a huge sales number. It means that you have a huge opportunity. Giving it to sales right away leaves you at risk to miss out on a lot of revenue. Remember, your sales reps will be a lot more effective if they can focus on 10 great opportunities rather than 100 unknowns.