Are Your Leads the Result of a Sharp Shooter’s Gun or a Shotgun?

The most effective salespeople are laser-focused on results and work only the most qualified leads from their marketing team. They bypass the shotgun blasted leads generated by broadly targeted campaigns, like webinars and direct marketing campaigns. Justifiably, sales teams consider most marketing leads unqualified—not worthy of the effort to uncover the few that are sales qualified. In fact, fewer than 7% of leads that are passed on to sales from marketing meet the qualifications for true and actionable leads.

If instead marketing started with a highly targeted prospect list, laser-focused outbound marketing campaigns would provide sharp-shooter sales teams with fully qualified leads. Starting with multi-touch marketing activities centered on exploratory phone calls and nurturing emails result in a pinpoint set of leads. These efforts allow sales professionals to concentrate on closing highly qualified leads versus prospecting through responses.

Fewer than 93% of leads generated are junk. The problem is that neither marketing nor sales has a mandate (or the interest) to nurture leads. One of the problems is that neither organization knows what to do and how to do it. It is common for marketing to use email and/or marketing automation tools to stay in touch with prospects and score their activities. Intent is red hot now and that is a common tool marketing uses to score leads. I have seen more misses than hits using this approach. The challenge is that the best targets, senior executives, are 2.5 times more likely to respond to a quality multi-touch campaign as are their junior counterparts.

Sales on the other hand despises making cold calls when so many of those calls end up wasting their time. That is why most leads go into a dark hole called CRM. Whether it is executed by marketing and/or sales, multi-touch, media and cycle programs are required. One and done just does not cut it.

The laser targeted approach holds sales accountable for every lead. And most importantly, outbound calls combined with nurturing emails result in significantly higher closing rates and lower costs per lead.

Is your team using multi-touch, multi-media, multi-cycle processes to multiply results?   

Nurturing can triple the return on marketing and sales investments. Is your team effectively nurturing?

Call (770-262-9021) or email me (dan.mcdade@prospect-experience.com) for a free consult.