Most companies have the classic problem of spending money on the marketing side of the fence in order to generate leads only to see that those leads are not followed up effectively by the sales team. This classic leakage of leads to unnecessary expense and definitely inhibits a company's ability to accelerate its sales.
If your company is experiencing this problem there is a solution, it's quite easy for you to reengineer your marketing and sales process and connect the dots so that you don't have any discontinuity between the functions that are generating leads and those who are supposed to follow up on them.
Here are a couple of quick ideas on how you can stop the leakage of sales leads in your pipeline. First, if your sales people are complaining that your leads are of poor quality, find another way to qualify those leads and nurture those leads before you hand them off to the sales team. Most companies use inside lead qualifications specialists who are telesales or telemarketing professionals to do this function. Best in class companies realize that the sales leads often times need to be further qualified and nurtured before they're handed off to field sales teams…otherwise sales people won't work on them because they don't believe that they're of good enough quality. The telemarketing or inside lead qualification function is a very important one to be able to make sure that you patch the hole and stop the leakage of sales leads between marketing and sales.
Another thing you can do is you can add sales lead follow up as key criteria in your performance management system and metrics for measuring and rewarding your sales people. With today's CRM systems, it's easy to be able to track whether or not your sales people are actually following up on leads that are passed to them by marketing; with a quick click of a button you can easily see whether those leads are actually being touched and what the lead disposition is. Hold salespeople accountable for making sure that they're constantly following up on those leads. If you bring lead follow up into the mix of key measurement criteria and you tie their incentives to the performance of that function, you'll find out how quickly they actually change their attitude and start following up on every sales lead that's passed to them. These are just a couple of ideas about how to stop sales lead leakage in your organization.
About Cube Management
Cube Management delivers sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions (whether recruiting, interim management or consulting) that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results. Download the Cube Management Inside Sales Guide and the Cube Management Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide.
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