Best Practices for Lead Generation: Converged Sales and Marketing
The B-to-B buying process has changed. If you have not noticed by now you must be hiding under a rock or your company must be on the verge of going out of business. Buyers have a wealth of information available online and use the internet and social networks to shop around, research products and solutions as well as vendors. With sales people involved later, marketers are having to get involved or stay involved longer in the customers buying process. The problem is, many companies still have a large gap between where marketing stops and sales begins. This grey area needs to be addressed with converged sales and marketing.
There has been a great deal of hype over the past few years over the power for marketing to generate more leads. While there is the power for many companies to generate more leads with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SMM (Social Media Marketing), and MA (Marketing Automation), most of these leads are not sales ready. What most companies fail to realize is that many of these leads are useless unless someone picks up the phone and qualifies the lead. In most B-to-B companies, the majority of sales reps don’t want to waste the time qualifying “unqualified” leads that marketing generates. This causes even greater need for converged sales and marketing.
In working with many large organizations, we have found that lead generation requires more than just traditional inbound marketing tactics (live events, seminars and webinars, white papers, guides, blogs and social media) and needs to also have a call qualifying and appointment setting component to deliver the maximum return on investment for our clients. The following are some metrics from one such example over a 60-day campaign.
While the converged sales and marketing process did deliver 12% more leads, the most important part is that it reduced the amount of time it took from our clients sales force to qualify the more than 2,800 leads generated from inbound marketing.
Does this mean that inbound marketing does not work? Actually, the exact opposite: these campaigns delivered greater than 5% greater return on investment than what this client was doing before. What it does mean is that inbound marketing lead nurturing can only take a client so far, and after that it takes a human voice talking to your prospects the rest of the way. For many companies, their sales force does not have the capacity or the tenacity that it takes to make this happen.
What this does mean is that you need to have someone pick up the phone to qualify and nurture the lead before you pass it off to sales. Someone needs to verify the data that you have been given and determine if the lead meets the criteria of a qualified prospect. Inbound marketing, marketing automation, and lead generation need to work together. If not, you are going to have the sales department refusing to follow up on them because they feel the leads are “a waste of time.” Whether you have someone internally nurture the leads or you use a lead generation outsourcing company, you must not lose sight of the goal: to generate nurtured, scored, qualified leads that you can provide to your sales team that will result in a shorter sales cycle and more closed deals.
Want to learn more about how to build a lead generation engine that understands how to converge your sales and marketing process? Check out this free guide.
The Executives' Guide to Building a Lead Generation Engine
Looking for ways for marketing to show ROI? This guide will help you build a lead generation engine that maps to your customers buying process and delivers maximum measurable ROI. Download our free The Executives' Guide to Building a Lead Generation Engine.