The Marketing And Sales Debate Over A Qualified Lead
Accepting a ‘disconnect’ between marketing and sales is unacceptable. When working in conjunction with each other as a team, both groups have the ability to create a finely tuned machine that drives revenue. With the appropriate and consistent communication between marketing and sales, this does not have to be overly complicated to achieve. The lead qualification process is a necessary and obviously important bridge to cross in order to translate the marketing team’s work into revenue dollars. Most importantly, constantly generating the right amount of pipeline will keep the sales team cranking.
Thus it is important for sales and marketing to fully agree upon what constitutes a sales qualified lead. While a sales qualified lead has yet to translate into a revenue number, developing a clear definition around this may have a lot of gray areas. Here is what both parties need to keep in mind in order to come to a productive conclusion:
Marketing
Marketing should keep in mind that even if there is a lead qualification team in place to help convert opportunities, that the leads still need to be targeted, and that dumping a completely unqualified list to follow up on will not yield good results. The lead qualification team needs to make sure they tighten the criteria for leads they pass to sales in a way that only converts opportunities that are ready to discuss the solution at hand and have a compelling reason to move forward with your solution/service. If you keep the qualification criteria too loose, sales will have too many opportunities that need nurturing (which marketing should be handling), resulting in lost opportunities, and less revenue. Less leads that are highly qualified will result in far more success than a large number of leads that are lightly qualified.
Sales
On the other hand, sales should keep in mind that the lead qualification team can only take a prospect so far. Sales needs to accept meetings that may not be ready to close tomorrow, but will have the potential to close within a well defined and accepted timeframe. Bottomline, these leads should be designed to add immediate pipeline to the sales team. A prospect should be a fit for the solution, have the right pain points or a compelling reason to change their environment, has involvement in the decision making process, and has the ability to move forward in the timeframe agreed on. When these criteria are met, the ball is in the sales team’s court to carry the conversation to a potential close.
Constant communication and closing the loop on converted leads is a must. Marketing and sales must figure out a process that works in order to elicit feedback on all mid-funnel opportunities. The worst thing that can happen is allowing any opportunity to disappear from the funnel and slip through the cracks. I am always interested in what keeps the ball rolling between marketing and sales. What is your definition of a sales qualified lead?