I saw this blog posting on The Bridge Group’s website about when and how to transfer leads from marketing to sales. The post covered the topic well: how do you deal with “leads” generated by the marketing team and how do you manage the process of getting these leads to the sales team.
The song remains the same:
- Sales is not selling – they need more leads
- Marketing goes and gets more leads
- The contacts are passed to sales
- Sales calls a few – reports back that the leads are crap (sounds a bit like “Glengarry Glen Ross”)
- Marketing gets bummed that sales has not called all of the leads
- Marketing decides to “pre-qualify” the leads – they want to show sales they are good
- Processes get put in place – leads get scored – the whole process keeps getting tweaked
- This goes around and around
I’m not against any of this necessarily – it’s good to put some processes in place to “qualify” the leads that come out of marketing efforts. I bet lots of teams can come up with lots of good ways to solve these problems.
Still, the core issue for me is simple: how can you get someone who might be interested to talk to a salesperson as quickly as possible. I’ve seen situations where people call into a company and do not get a salesperson – they go to a qualifier or someone who is not responsible for selling. To me, this is a travesty. Any prospect should talk to a qualified salesperson whenever possible – they add the most value.
I guess there are some kinds of sales where you want an interested prospect to talk to a qualifier, but I honestly cannot think of one now. Customers have access to incredible amounts of info now, so they really need to talk to us less and less. The interactions we have are so much more important, so we need to maximize them. We can email them after that.
M y recommendation is to build any process that encourages direct contact from prospect to salesperson. Get the salespeople to call back but realize that they will be frustrated fast by the poor response rate. Reward the salesperson with a live prospect as often as possible – that will lead to sales.
