What happens your company gets a new lead? According to Marketing Sherpa, 61% of all B2B marketers will simply hand off those leads to the sales team without checking if they are qualified or not. That, despite the fact that only about one-quarter (27%) of all leads are qualified. You really can’t blame the marketing team — they are just doing their job. Their goal is to create as many leads as possible.
So what’s the best way to make sure that a greater percentage of leads turn into sales?
One tactic, of course, is to stop any unqualified leads from appearing in the sales funnel at all. That means coming up with a better way to score potential leads, so that only leads meeting a certain threshold or certain criteria will be handed off to the sales team. But it’s not just the responsibility of the marketing team here. The sales team has to take responsibility for making sure the marketing team knows what makes a “quality lead” in the first place.
For example, say that you’re a company selling B2B software. You might assume that the best sales prospects are CEOs and other C-suite executives within specific industries. As a result, all the marketing collateral is tailored to the needs of those top executives. But what if the best sales prospects are actually someone else inside the company? Or executives in an entirely new industry?
That’s something that the sales team would have to relay to the marketing team so that the tactics are aligned accordingly.
Another tactic is to embrace the exciting new area of marketing automation. What this means is that you automate the entire process of leading prospects through the sales funnel. Instead of relying on your sales team to follow up on leads on a regular basis, you can instead set up a marketing automation program that handles everything for you.
For example, one strategy is to follow-up within a certain period of time after a prospect has downloaded a case study or white paper. Instead of having a sales rep call up this prospect, you can simply schedule an e-mail to go out at a designated point in time.
The important point to keep in mind here is that it’s best to personalize the marketing message that you send to any prospect. And the key to delivering the right amount of personalization at the right time is understanding where that prospect is within the sales funnel. For a prospect at the very top a sales funnel, a different marketing message would be appropriate than if the prospect were at the bottom of the sales funnel.
As a rule of thumb, approximately one-half (48%) of B2B buyers consume anywhere between 2 and 5 pieces of content before making a purchasing decision. So you can see the importance of marketing automation here. You can’t expect a single sales rep to make 2-5 phone calls per lead! But you can easily schedule the timing of 2-5 emails, each one of them helping to educate the customer about what you offer.
So, as you can see, simply focusing on a single number – the number of leads – is not always helpful. What’s more effective is to focus on is coming up with a way to segment your leads into different groups, and then deliver a personalized message for each different group of prospects.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.