Are you prepared to capture all inquiries in a database for ongoing nurturing and qualification efforts?

To avoid having any of the golden sales opportunities represented by your inquiries fall through the cracks, you need to capture all of your inquiries in a database so you can properly manage their fulfillment, nurturing, qualification and distribution. With this in mind:

Do you have a program in place to “qualify” sales leads before sending them to your salespeople, reps, dealers or distributors?

If your business-to-business marketing- for-leads program is to succeed, marketing, sales and corporate management need to share a unified definition of qualified sales leads.

If you all agree from the start on what a qualified lead is, then deliver leads that meet that definition, your sales team will be able to effectively and efficiently follow up and close more sales.

Do you have a process in place for distributing qualified leads to sales contacts as they are identified?

Sales leads are worthless unless they are quickly handed off to the right sales contact for follow up.

Your lead distribution process has to be well defined and ready to go—in advance—so as to prevent delays or misdirection when leads are qualified and ready for sales attention.

It also has to be easy for your salespeople, reps, resellers and distributors to access the qualified sales leads and manage their lead follow up.

Do you have a program in place to nurture or cultivate your not-yet- qualified leads?

Salespeople generally focus on those one-in-four sales leads who are ready to buy soon. However, research shows that three of four sales come from longer-term prospects who are frequently ignored by sales.

As these longer-term leads represent the lion’s share of the potentional sales, your sales lead management program must be designed to help nurture the longer- term leads until they are qualified as being sales-ready opportunities.

Do you have a program in place to measure and track the results of your various sales-lead generation, cultivation and sales follow-up programs?

A marketer I know recently reported to her management on the results of the company’s lead generation programs: Awareness of their company and its products among targeted prospects more than doubled; the cost per qualified lead delivered to sales by marketing dropped by nearly 40 percent; 58 percent of the opportunities in the sales pipeline were found first by marketing; and 48 percent of the sales closed; and 62 percent of the revenue during the past 12 months came from marketing-generated leads.

The result? She got a bigger B2B marketing budget and senior management no longer doubts marketing's contribution to the company's success. Can you answer these questions and show your management how your lead generation programs are contributing to your company’s success?

Refer to this checklist of questions to guide the development or improvement of your company’s sales lead management programs and processes and you’ll have the best chance of being successful.

<< Back to More Articles