Creating high-quality leads and sales opportunities
Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2024 11:04 am
Most B2B marketers say their most important task is lead generation. However, we use many definitions of a lead, and this can cause serious communication problems with sales departments and make it difficult to evaluate the work of marketers.
That's why today in ABC Marketingu B2B about what a lead is, how it differs from a prospect and a sales opportunity. You will also learn why it is so important to have one, consistent definition of a lead.
Lead – a bone of contention
Most of the misunderstandings I encountered between marketing and sales departments resulted from different understandings of the tasks of both teams.
Knowing that the company maintains a marketing department dominica business email list that is supposed to generate leads, salespeople expect to be handed customers who are just waiting to receive an offer.
On the other hand, marketers are tempted to provide salespeople with every piece of information about a potential customer, even if it does not contain the information that is essential to deciding whether to engage the salesperson.
Typically, the reason for this situation is the lack of a lead definition and a clear definition of the tasks of marketers and sellers in the sales process.
How to define a lead?
So let's get down to what a lead really is.
Just looking at the dictionary definition can be mind-boggling. According to Webster's dictionary , lead has four meanings as a noun and five as a verb. Now we know where the confusion in understanding the definition of lead comes from.
A lead in the sales sense is defined in Webster's dictionary as information that can lead us to something. So a lead will be any business information that gives a chance to start the sales process.
Still too general?
Create your own lead definition
I will disappoint you, dear reader. It turns out that there is no single definition of a lead that fits every situation and company. That is why it is worth defining it clearly in your organization and then following it with iron consistency.
We know that a lead can be very general information, with one condition – it must provide a prospect for further work.
That's why I believe that a lead can be defined as the transfer of any data that we can use in the process of communicating with a potential client .
This is what differentiates a lead from a prospect – a marketing prospect (not to be confused with a sales prospect) is information that does not yet contain the data that would allow for contact. Prospects would be anonymous visitors to our website or conference attendees. In both cases, we need to find a way to start communication.
A lead contains data that enables further communication.
If you have a newsletter sign-up form on your website that contains only one field – an email address, you can treat filling out such a form as creating a very early lead. If someone has given the company their email address and agreed to receive newsletters, there is a chance for further communication that may result in a sale – that is a lead.
A similar example would be obtaining a business card during a trade fair or conference. Here, it is also worth taking care to obtain formal consent to receive offers.
Of course, such a lead is not suitable for transfer to the sales department. For this reason, such an early lead should not be attacked with commercial offers. I started the sentence with "of course", but such practices unfortunately take place. What happens then? We very quickly end up on blacklists of potential customers and lose the chance to move on to the next stage of work on the lead.
Difficult lead qualification
An early lead needs to be developed, i.e. additional information needs to be obtained, which will allow us to prepare personalized marketing activities, and consequently, will open the way for salespeople to start the sales process. We call this stage lead qualification. Its purpose is to collect basic information, which will allow the decision to join the salesperson in the process.
The most well-known set of lead qualification criteria is the so-called BANT developed several decades ago at MIT for IBM, currently used in most corporations. It consists of the following criteria:
B – Budget
A – Authority – decision-making power of the lead
N – Need – the need to have our product
T – Timeline – time perspective of the purchase decision
This is the most well-known set of qualification criteria, but because it was created at a time when no one had heard of digital marketing , it is quite a challenge to apply. I see a few challenges here.
It can be very difficult to determine a budget at the marketing stage. Few customers will share this information at the early stages of contact with the company. It can also be misleading to determine the decision-making power of our contact, because in most organizations, purchasing decisions are made by a group of people who form a formal or informal buying committee.
For this reason, the BANT criteria worked well for companies that employed telesales reps whose primary job was to conduct lead profiling calls and schedule appointments with salespeople.
Scoring is better than BANT in digital marketing
If you have digital marketing tools that allow you to analyze a potential customer's interactions with the content and resources you provide them with, using appropriate criteria to evaluate such behavior will be a more effective lead qualification tool.
In short, the process involves engaging a customer in a set of interactions – reading an email, downloading an e-book, participating in a webinar or conference while simultaneously obtaining information about, for example, the size of the company, job position or tasks of our contact. This is often done with the help of valuable content that can be downloaded after leaving a small amount of information.
In this way, we collect information about who our contact is and how they behave on our website – what content they read, what messages they open, etc.
Systems such as HubSpot or Oracle Marketing Cloud allow for very precise definition of scoring criteria, thanks to which our understanding of the “maturation” of a lead will be based on data, not assumptions. It is important that the sales team participates in the process of establishing scoring criteria – i.e. assessing the value of a lead. Firstly, their observations will be crucial for selecting the right criteria – behaviors that really matter. Secondly – this is a great opportunity to explain to salespeople the logic behind the marketing automation system , thanks to which they will have realistic expectations regarding the effects of its work.
Typically, scoring criteria require further tuning based on practical conclusions. This is the normal course of events. Initially, many criteria are introduced based on our best knowledge, but not supported by practice.
Advanced marketing automation systems, such as Oracle Marketing Cloud (Eloqua), enable the creation of several scoring matrices. This is very useful when our customer group is highly diversified, as is the set of activities directed at them.
A simple example would be segmenting the database based on the size of the clients. For large clients, we organize business breakfasts, stationary trainings and study visits. The fact of appearing at such a meeting will be recorded in the system and will have a positive impact on scoring. In the case of smaller clients, we do not offer such activities, so they will not have a chance to earn these points. With such diverse groups, it is advisable to create separate scoring criteria.
That's why today in ABC Marketingu B2B about what a lead is, how it differs from a prospect and a sales opportunity. You will also learn why it is so important to have one, consistent definition of a lead.
Lead – a bone of contention
Most of the misunderstandings I encountered between marketing and sales departments resulted from different understandings of the tasks of both teams.
Knowing that the company maintains a marketing department dominica business email list that is supposed to generate leads, salespeople expect to be handed customers who are just waiting to receive an offer.
On the other hand, marketers are tempted to provide salespeople with every piece of information about a potential customer, even if it does not contain the information that is essential to deciding whether to engage the salesperson.
Typically, the reason for this situation is the lack of a lead definition and a clear definition of the tasks of marketers and sellers in the sales process.
How to define a lead?
So let's get down to what a lead really is.
Just looking at the dictionary definition can be mind-boggling. According to Webster's dictionary , lead has four meanings as a noun and five as a verb. Now we know where the confusion in understanding the definition of lead comes from.
A lead in the sales sense is defined in Webster's dictionary as information that can lead us to something. So a lead will be any business information that gives a chance to start the sales process.
Still too general?
Create your own lead definition
I will disappoint you, dear reader. It turns out that there is no single definition of a lead that fits every situation and company. That is why it is worth defining it clearly in your organization and then following it with iron consistency.
We know that a lead can be very general information, with one condition – it must provide a prospect for further work.
That's why I believe that a lead can be defined as the transfer of any data that we can use in the process of communicating with a potential client .
This is what differentiates a lead from a prospect – a marketing prospect (not to be confused with a sales prospect) is information that does not yet contain the data that would allow for contact. Prospects would be anonymous visitors to our website or conference attendees. In both cases, we need to find a way to start communication.
A lead contains data that enables further communication.
If you have a newsletter sign-up form on your website that contains only one field – an email address, you can treat filling out such a form as creating a very early lead. If someone has given the company their email address and agreed to receive newsletters, there is a chance for further communication that may result in a sale – that is a lead.
A similar example would be obtaining a business card during a trade fair or conference. Here, it is also worth taking care to obtain formal consent to receive offers.
Of course, such a lead is not suitable for transfer to the sales department. For this reason, such an early lead should not be attacked with commercial offers. I started the sentence with "of course", but such practices unfortunately take place. What happens then? We very quickly end up on blacklists of potential customers and lose the chance to move on to the next stage of work on the lead.
Difficult lead qualification
An early lead needs to be developed, i.e. additional information needs to be obtained, which will allow us to prepare personalized marketing activities, and consequently, will open the way for salespeople to start the sales process. We call this stage lead qualification. Its purpose is to collect basic information, which will allow the decision to join the salesperson in the process.
The most well-known set of lead qualification criteria is the so-called BANT developed several decades ago at MIT for IBM, currently used in most corporations. It consists of the following criteria:
B – Budget
A – Authority – decision-making power of the lead
N – Need – the need to have our product
T – Timeline – time perspective of the purchase decision
This is the most well-known set of qualification criteria, but because it was created at a time when no one had heard of digital marketing , it is quite a challenge to apply. I see a few challenges here.
It can be very difficult to determine a budget at the marketing stage. Few customers will share this information at the early stages of contact with the company. It can also be misleading to determine the decision-making power of our contact, because in most organizations, purchasing decisions are made by a group of people who form a formal or informal buying committee.
For this reason, the BANT criteria worked well for companies that employed telesales reps whose primary job was to conduct lead profiling calls and schedule appointments with salespeople.
Scoring is better than BANT in digital marketing
If you have digital marketing tools that allow you to analyze a potential customer's interactions with the content and resources you provide them with, using appropriate criteria to evaluate such behavior will be a more effective lead qualification tool.
In short, the process involves engaging a customer in a set of interactions – reading an email, downloading an e-book, participating in a webinar or conference while simultaneously obtaining information about, for example, the size of the company, job position or tasks of our contact. This is often done with the help of valuable content that can be downloaded after leaving a small amount of information.
In this way, we collect information about who our contact is and how they behave on our website – what content they read, what messages they open, etc.
Systems such as HubSpot or Oracle Marketing Cloud allow for very precise definition of scoring criteria, thanks to which our understanding of the “maturation” of a lead will be based on data, not assumptions. It is important that the sales team participates in the process of establishing scoring criteria – i.e. assessing the value of a lead. Firstly, their observations will be crucial for selecting the right criteria – behaviors that really matter. Secondly – this is a great opportunity to explain to salespeople the logic behind the marketing automation system , thanks to which they will have realistic expectations regarding the effects of its work.
Typically, scoring criteria require further tuning based on practical conclusions. This is the normal course of events. Initially, many criteria are introduced based on our best knowledge, but not supported by practice.
Advanced marketing automation systems, such as Oracle Marketing Cloud (Eloqua), enable the creation of several scoring matrices. This is very useful when our customer group is highly diversified, as is the set of activities directed at them.
A simple example would be segmenting the database based on the size of the clients. For large clients, we organize business breakfasts, stationary trainings and study visits. The fact of appearing at such a meeting will be recorded in the system and will have a positive impact on scoring. In the case of smaller clients, we do not offer such activities, so they will not have a chance to earn these points. With such diverse groups, it is advisable to create separate scoring criteria.