Sales professionals look at a lead from marketing and ask three questions:
- Are they willing to buy?
- Are they willing to buy from me?
- Are they willing to buy from me now?
If the answer to all three of these questions is yes, then Sales has a qualified lead. It has an opportunity with a potential buyer that is in the right stage of the buying cycle to talk to Sales, has gotten all of its general questions answered, and is ready to talk to a sales person about how the company’s products or services could be deployed in the buyer’s particular environment.
What if the answers to the sales professional’s questions aren’t known? Then the sales person has to manually qualify the lead.
Qualifying leads is not the best use of a sales person’s time
So let’s take a closer look at those marketing leads. They fall into a few categories:
- Visitors that will never buy from you – they are simply not qualified.
- Visitors that might buy from you, but it’s the wrong time in the buying cycle to bring in a salesperson.
- Visitors that might buy from you, it’s the right time in the buying cycle for them to talk to potential vendors, but they still need a lot of education.
What impact does this have on the sales person doing the qualifying?
- Visitors who will never buy from you could probably have figured that out for themselves with a little more exposure to your company. It was a waste of time for the sales person AND an opportunity cost of time that could have been spent on a real opportunity.
- Visitors that might buy from you, but it’s too early. The sales person finds out the buyers are early in their process and discards the lead. Too bad because with some nurturing from Marketing, this could eventually turn into a real lead. Waste of time for sales, loss of a potential lead for Marketing.
- Visitors that might be ready to buy now, but need a lot of education to get there. Sales has to spend time educating a customer, an inefficient use of this valuable resource. Much better to have let the buyer get this education from marketing which can provide a more comprehensive education and at a low cost through the web site and information marketing.
Marketing can automate the qualification process
What’s the answer? Identify what information the buyer needs to solve their problem at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Use Marketing activities to create value for the buyer at each stage. Let the buyer signal where they are in their journey by the material they ask for (white papers, product and company information, tutorials on how to sell the project internally, case studies, testimonials, and video demonstrations).
Visitors unsuited for your products and services will quickly disqualify themselves and move on.
Visitors who might buy in the future will move through the stages of their buying cycle, getting the education from you that they need at each stage.
Visitors who are ready now can still educate themselves with the material that Marketing provides and then quickly signal to your company that they are ready to talk to Sales. When the sales person talks to this buyer, the conversation immediately becomes productive for both parties as they quickly focus on how your company can solve their particular problem.
Sales productivity is a financial accelerator
What’s the financial impact of this approach? Since the leads that come from marketing are more qualified, sales will be more productive at converting leads into opportunities and converting opportunities into orders. This improvement will have linear impact on Revenue and Gross Profits.
But wait, there’s more! This increase in revenue was done with no additional sales expense. Sales was simply more productive. So the impact on Operational Profits will be much more than linear. Improving sales productivity (reducing “waste” in the terminology of process improvement) will have an exponential impact on the profitability of your marketing and sales system.
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