Your Leads – Rotting Away Like Week Old Fruit…
“Big data,” “predictive analytics,” and “lead nurture” are all the buzz when it comes to go to market strategy…. So, you, not wanting to fall behind in the digital sales and marketing world invested in some pretty cool solutions that should help you gather more leads and close more deals:
- Marketing automation tools – analyzes data to develop buyer personas and garnished some leads from your nurture campaign
- Retargeting ads – segments prospect groups and retargeted web-visitors to drive leads
- Dynamic web content – targets leads with the most relevant content and received a few form fills
- CRM – Gives your reps a system to keep record of all contacts and accounts
You did everything right (according to “best practice” standards) and you rolled it out. Good news – marketing is seeing more more qualified MQLs than ever before! But wait…why aren’t you closing more deals?
The problem is, your MQLs don’t close deals.
Having an efficient marketing to sales handoff is critical to turn your leads into buyers. Once you identify your list of MQLS, the next step is to get them in the hands of sales people. But where did they go? Did sales follow-up?
Timing is critical.
Leads may be prime and interested when you initially gathered them, but they are perishable and decay at a rapid rate despite a comprehensive CRM that houses them. There are two types of decaying leads:
- Exhausted leads – Over touched, either by sales or marketing. Conducting more outreach could mean damaging the relationship.
- Perishable leads – Undertouched after passed to sales. Sales may follow-up too late, or not at all.
By ignoring the workflow (meaning, the process in which you handle leads), all of the work you’ve done to generate these leads will fall flat. Your leads will begin to decay and you won’t see changes in conversion rates.
Workflow is imperative.
At MarketBridge, we see this all too often. Workflow, is imperative for your team to see efforts through to revenue. Marketing to sales handoff and a standardized approach for sales execution should be built off of these 3 imperatives:
- Content and data gathered in one place for your sales team to use and execute on
- Prioritization measures in place to make sure the most important leads are communicated with in timely manner
- A reporting loop to understand the outcome of your efforts and know if marketing’s “hot leads” converted
Share your thoughts below. Do your marketing tactics often fall flat?
