If your sales team paid every lead that came through the funnel an equal amount of attention, reps would be wasting a tremendous amount of time. That’s because not every lead deserves equal attention – some are naturally more likely to buy than others.
To address this issue, sales and marketing teams developed a process for qualifying leads to determine which ones have the highest potential to buy.
For a prospective buyer to become a lead, they must express interest in the product or service that you are selling. It’s likely that this buyer filled out an online contact form or provided their information in another way to indicate that they would like to be contacted. When this happens, the prospective buyer is now a marketing qualified leads.
The best way to ensure that leads are meeting your qualification standards is by scheduling a phone call with the prospective buyer as an initial follow-up. The goal of this initial discovery call is to gain an understanding of why the buyer is interested in your product or service and ask the necessary questions to determine if they are truly sales-ready.
As you can tell by the name, Sales Leads are qualified by the sales team. In recent years, many companies have built out business development teams that are solely responsible for serving this function. Allocating the entire qualified sales leads process to a specific team allows for a highly efficient sales process.
Defining what a prospect leads means to your business is key to eventually converting qualified leads to customers. This is accomplished by effective communication and alignment between sales and marketing. Both parties should outline clear expectations for their part in the sales funnel, and detail the process by which a lead will be passed off from one to the other.
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