Transform Marketing Leads into Sales Leads

October 8, 2015

Your marketing and sales teams have one common goal: encourage customers to buy. So if their goals are so similar, why is it that marketing and sales teams never seem to agree on how to transform marketing leads into sales leads?

Through they may go about achieving their goals in different ways, these two departments have more in common than you might think. If they could only start working together and speaking the same language, then your company would see a significant increase in revenue.

Here is our complete guide to making this process easier and more effective

Getting to know you

Though marketing and sales teams do have the same goals overall, they don’t always understand each other’s role in the company and have many misconceptions about each other.

Marketing, for example, focuses on generating leads and nurturing them overtime. Their goal to build as strong a foundation as possible before passing the lead off to the sales team. The sales team, however, moves much quicker than marketing. They’re looking for the person who wants to buy now, and they’re not usually concerned with leads over time. It’s just not something they have time for, especially when they need to meet monthly sales goals.

To get these two teams speaking the same language, they need to be in close, if not constant, communication with one another. Sales teams need to understand that strong leads don’t just fall out of the sky, and marketing teams must know that passing on a weak lead is all but wasting time.

Organise a weekly training sessions where marketing and sales teams discuss their processes. Get them talking about what makes a good lead and type of information customers ask for while on the phone. This will help marketers better anticipate what information a customer needs before making a purchase.

Work together on lead scoring

Now that you have your marketing and sales teams working together, it’s time to get them together to talk about how to properly score leads and convert them into sales. 

Lead scoring is best used to ensure that only the strongest leads are passed on to the sales team. Because leads are generated in such a variety of ways (Facebook advertising, email sign-ups, direct enquiries, etc), there needs to be a system in place to score all of these leads at rate them as the customer further interacts with the brand.

Direct enquiries, for example, are usually solid leads that should be passed to the sales team immediately for a follow-up phone call.

Your lead scoring model should be a point-based system created in a joint effort by the sales and marketing teams. Having input from the sales team will help both teams agree on what constitutes a qualified lead.

Speed up responses

Responses to direct enquiries need to be as fast as possible. These leads are by far the strongest, and they won’t be waiting around forever.

This is easier said than done. Real-time updates can be done with most CRM software, but if no one is checking that real-time report, how will anyone know to call those leads? In addition, salespeople are busy and they’re already making a lot of phone calls to leads who are equally as strong. So how do you keep these leads interested while waiting for your sales team to respond?

Many companies are now hiring what they call sales department representatives. These individuals are solely responsible for keeping track of direct inquiries and making contact with them. Once they get them on the phone, sales department representatives answer the direct inquiry along with any other additional questions the lead might have.

If the person is ready to speak with a sales representative, then the call will be transferred directly to a sales representative. If the person still isn’t ready, the sales department representative will follow up at a later date and answer more questions if needed. The process saves time for the salesperson, who doesn’t have to waste time calling back a lead who’s still on the fence, and there will still be someone to keep tabs on the lead and follow up when necessary.