What Does Marketing Know About Leads Anyway?

Cementing Your Sales Lead Management Strategy

It is tempting when consider a sales lead management strategy to assume that marketers do not know much about leads. However, the fields of sales and marketing are intimately interconnected, and if you are well versed in one there is a good chance you know a fair amount about the other. Marketers can teach the sales force a fair amount about sales lead management strategy.

Respect Marketing

Sales lead management strategy begins with an appreciation for marketing. After all, the marketing department is what drives the sales department because marketing produces leads. Unfortunately, marketing is not the ultimate group that works beyond the development and implementation of the sales lead management strategy, so sales can often get the impression that marketing is not connected to the process. In this kind of case, marketing may be getting leads perfectly well, but their lack of understanding about what brings about a closed sale may be lacking. This can be caused by or even contribute to a lack of understanding of what kinds of leads the marketing department should be collecting in the first place.

It is important that sales respects marketing and help them to understand what makes a qualified lead. They also do not necessarily understand what leads to making such a quality assessment. For a lead to be of high quality, there are certain factors that it needs to fit, and these must be custom for your company. For the marketing?department to know what these qualities are, they need to speak with the sales department in a civil way on a regular basis and compare notes.

Qualifying Leads

The qualification of leads is the process that marketing is built around. Marketing relies on mathematical models. For example, if 1,000 prospects visit a given website, roughly 100 of them become leads. From there, 50 individuals take a demo and 10 will end up making a purchase. While sales can sometimes work mathematically, it tends to emphasize the human element and the art of closing a sale. Marketing also needs to qualify the leads it receives carefully, or its mathematical models will be faulty. When the sales and marketing departments do not carefully communicate with one another, either sales receives poorly targeted and under qualified leads or they do not receive enough total leads. This is the fine line that marketing must walk.

Building Brand Respect

Marketing also has another joint function along with sales — both departments are partially responsible for building the public’s respect for the brand. If your company’s marketing department releases advertisements or posts web content that is not up to par, the sales process becomes far harder. By the same token, if your sales team is not connecting well with customers or treats them poorly, your company’s brand will also suffer. Working together to build a cohesive brand and voice, the sales and marketing departments can both advance the cause of the company as a whole and accomplish far more.

Percentages Over?Raw Numbers

One of the key conflicts between sales and marketing is the number of leads and their conversion rate. The dogma of marketing is that a given percentage of customers will convert, or move to the next stage of the marketing funnel that culminates in being a repeat buyer. Sales departments historically claim that marketing either supplies them with insufficient numbers of leads or plenty of under?qualified leads. When marketing and sales work together, they can form a reasonable set of expectations for qualification, raw numbers and conversion?percentages.

Converting and closing are cooperative roles. Sales and marketing need to work together.

Marketing Matters Inbound?is an inbound marketing firm specializing in online conversions, content?strategy, PPC campaigns and traditional media placement. Our experience in?B2B digital?marketing?and?traditional media?allows us to deliver results through a strategic media mix. We believe in?aligning and merging marketing and sales/operations for optimal return on your marketing investment.