Qualifying Your Sales Leads
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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.
For this reason the cost per sales lead is an irrelevant measure, unless you could answer the question: what is the level of acceptance of the sales leads that enter your sales pipeline? It is then easier to find out what the cost per sale opportunity 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.
When accepting sales leads into the pipeline, think about the quality that you need in order to reach your goals. You can do this better when your marketing department has trained people, and when the process is designed appropriately. The quality of the sales leads has a great influence on your sales and therefore in your return of investments.
If your company is using the "cost effective" model when it comes to sales leads, you had better think again. When using this mental frame your natural tendency is to decrease costs often at the expense of quality. It is crucial that a company realizes that many of the sales leads are not high quality sales leads.
Therefore, ask yourself these questions:
Are we giving the sales department the information they need?
Are these sales leads likely to become customers?
Many times, the pressure for Leads forces marketing to share them when they have not reached a mature point and are not really qualified.
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.
When marketing departments provide information on Leads that sales departments cannot use, they quickly get a bad reputation and lead lose their meaning.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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