Lead Defining Creates Marketing/Sales Success

When you don’t know who you are going after, more times than not your marketing and sales department start going off in two different directions. In the B2B telemarketing world, where I spent 25% or my time, a sales ready lead is defined quite specifically as someone who has engaged in a meaningful conversation and has a defined project, or need with a timeframe to buy, a budget to work with and a willingness to go further down the sales process with a salesperson. When trying to align marketing and sales and focus those departmental efforts on prospects can turn them into customers faster. This is why it is crucial to qualify your leads carefully.

By setting up the qualifying criteria for your leads you focus everyone on what kind of person or company buys from your company. Without this qualification information you will end up with inaccurate data in your marketing and pass on false or leads that are less than optimal. As you collect names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, only a small fraction, probably only about 10% are really viable leads that should be pushed on to the sales team.

In qualifying leads via telemarketing you can take raw names, identify them down faster into what we might call sales ready leads. When this works when you pinpoint your marketing into tight areas, everyone is happier and on the same page, something that many marketing and sales departments have a hard time with.

Larson Notes & Satire: In the mysterious world of lead generation quality of quantity is really the key. By mapping out what qualifies a viable lead keeps sales people from wild goose chases and lets marketing use higher priced marketing tools more effectively. If you hone in on your target your chances of striking pay dirt go up a thousand fold. In my business we often have to sit down in front of our crystal ball for a customer guessing on who they should be talking to because, quite frankly, they have no idea. Thank God for SIC numbers!

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
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