Think About Quality And Not Quantity When It Comes To Sales Leads
One important recommendation: qualify before quantifying. What your company should do instead of worrying about the numbers is the quality of the sales leads that the marketing department transfers to Sales and how many of them become successful deals.
It is important to understand that the relevance of the sales leads in order to justify their costs. A company is generally unaware of how many sales leads it takes to get a sale, and what the cost of this really is.
Marketing people have the tendency to focus only on the cost per sales lead. This happens because they do not know what happens with the sales leads once they are sent to the sales department. This is one of the reasons why it is important to close the feedback loop between sales and marketing departments and why it is key to have a management process of leads.
Turning sales leads into sales is basically a matter of find out which ones have greater quality. This process is influenced by factors like training, process management, etc. The quality of the sales leads has great repercussions on the bottom line of any company.
When you focus only on cost effectiveness, you may actually be sacrificing quality along the process. However this approach is uncommon, but it is important to be aware that the number of high quality sales leads is often low.
The key questions to ask are:
Are we giving the sales department the information they need?
Can they possibly turn these sales leads into sales?
Marketing departments have metrics to meet and of course are under a lot of pressure. This stress may force them to rush into qualifying sales leads ineffectively.
The truth of the matter is that unqualified sales leads can likely be translated into important input losses for your sales department, and therefore affecting your bottom line. Unqualified leads take up your salespeople’s time and money. And this is why we cannot measure the cost of sales leads using this framework.
You will be damaging the reputation of your marketing department if you allow them to share unqualified sales leads.
