Every marketer who has been tasked with generating leads has experienced the feeling of rejection from sales. Marketing generated leads are not only rejected, but ignored. Both of these reactions hurt.
We have enough emotional drama in the rest of our lives, so we need to get it out of our work lives.
If marketers do their jobs well, which we all want to, the sales team has a full pipeline of qualified leads to contact. A percentage of them become customers. This is the plan. That is how a company grows.
So many companies exist in this limbo state where marketing and sales do not function as team. Marketing generates leads that sales does not want. They don’t want them because history has shown them that they won’t convert to customers. This is what happens when you focus purely on the number of leads generated. Not a sound strategy.
The key to the alignment between marketing and sales is to develop the correct profile of sales-ready leads. Both teams need to fully understand what kinds of prospects become customers. Marketing can develop programs to target those people and sales can work to close the deals.
Marketers really do want better leads. Seventy percent of them have said they want better quality leads. Step one is to align with sales to define what better quality leads are, but step two is where the execution really happens. That is to establish a lead scoring system in your marketing automation system to determine which leads really are better.
Lead scoring is an objective ranking of one sales lead against another. This not only helps align the right follow-up to prospects, but it also helps marketing and sales professionals identify where each prospect is in the buying process.
This is what the best marketers do. According to the Aberdeen Group, 68% of best-in-class marketing automation users leverage lead scoring functionality.
Why is lead scoring so important? Because it helps ensure that the best leads are followed up on immediately by prioritizing leads according to revenue potential and buyer readiness. Your sales team will close more sales when they are talking to the right people.
And lead scoring does not exist in a silo. If marketers understand what their best prospects looks like, they create more appropriate marketing. In one study 68% of top marketers report lead scoring as most responsible for improving the revenue contribution of content marketing.
When marketers drive revenue, everyone is happy. And the road to marketing and sales alignment is paved with better quality leads. Lead scoring can get you on your way.
Learn the basics of leading scoring, including how to develop your own lead scoring model, by downloading the Lead Scoring Guide for Modern Marketers.
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