To make sure you don’t lose your best B2B lead generation efforts when you hand them over to sales, you need to start by clearly defining what a good lead is. Both sales and marketing should agree on this definition. Then you’ll need to set up processes and standards for lead nurturing, communication between sales and marketing and lead scoring.
Define a Good Lead
Leads become lost because sales and marketing albania telemarketing database people have not defined what a good lead is or clearly identified who is responsible for lead nurturing.
Sales people would, of course,
like marketing to fuel their sales funnel with ready-to-buy leads. They want to make a presentation, negotiate the price, and close the deal! And they expect marketing to give them leads that enable them to do just that.
Marketing, on the other hand,
focuses on generating leads and think their job is done once they’ve entered the lead into the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system.
There are actually two definitions of a good lead:
If someone may be willing and able to buy at some time in the future, it is a good marketing lead.
When a decision maker is ready to buy in a set timeframe, they have the budget and the needs have been determined, it becomes a good sales lead.
Nurture Your Marketing Leads
Good marketing leads need to be nurtured so that when they are ready to buy, they are more likely to turn to your company than a competitor. Just because they are not sales-ready the day you receive them, it doesn’t mean they are less valuable than leads that are ready to buy now.