V5.22: Generating Top Quality, Sales-Ready Leads

As most of you know, we talk a lot about content and social media marketing. We wanted to take this week to shed some light on the relationship dynamic between marketing and sales. Often times, the marketing team will provide sales with a plethora of leads for them to follow up with and prospect. However, that tends to mean lower-quality leads and a whole lot of wasted time for the sales team. Marketing needs to funnel down top notch leads, but at smaller doses.

This will ultimately help the sales division be more productive in their work and allow them to offer up more genuine interactions to potential clients. Improving the quality of the leads will also improve the bottom line.

So, how does one do that? We recently came across a great article by Lauren Barber with Zoominfo.com that gives 4 tips on generating those higher quality leads. Let’s discuss them, shall we?

1. “Align sales and marketing” First and foremost, if marketing and sales aren’t aligned, you can forget about generating top-tier leads. Marketing could spend tons and tons of time and effort on developing leads, but without alignment, sales will just never follow up on them. Sales and marketing HAVE to agree on the buyer personas and target market before each team sets out to work. These two teams must work together often to achieve their goals. Marketing wants to generate leads that are sales-ready, not just any type of lead available.
2. “Identify your buyer personas” We know all about buyer personas, don’t we friends? We just mentioned that both sales and marketing have to agree on these and that is so true. All the various teams of the company are ON THE SAME SIDE. You all want the same thing: success and profit. So, why wouldn’t you work together to create the best possible buyer personas you can? Barber wrote these four data points to help identify personas: “top performing customers, best leads, biggest deals, and customers who closed fastest.” If you need some more tips on discovering your buyer personas, check out our past blog on the topic.
3. “Nurture your leads” There are two types of leads within your funnel: the ones who have a need for the product but don’t realize and the ones who have a need but aren’t ready to purchase yet. This is where the nurturing comes into play. You can’t just forget about those people! You have to coax them into it; they need to be reminded that they need your service. Use lead nurturing programs in order to educate and engage with those prospects. Get them sales ready!
4. “Ask qualifying questions” Generally speaking, people don’t love long-winded questionnaires or answering a bunch of needless questions. Only ask the important qualifying questions. You don’t want to bore them away. Only ask for the information you REALLY need to figure out if they are sales-ready. You want to find out which leads are hotter and which ones need less involvement.

So, that’s it! What do you think? Sales and marketing are closely linked no matter what and nurturing that relationship will help the success of the business in the long run. Provide that sales team with the best damn leads you can and they will thank you for it.