The quality and quantity of leads can cause a significant amount of heartburn between sales and marketing. Marketing can generate leads until the cows come home, but if they’re not the right kind of leads, they’re useless to sales.
So how can marketing and sales fix this problem and finally get along? They can start by working together to define and agree upon what constitutes a quality lead. CMO.com has a great list of 13 criteria, which includes:
- Budget. It’s important that a potential lead be able to afford your product or service. Whether they entered their budget into a lead generation form or told a salesperson over the phone, give leads with sufficient budget a higher score.
- Downloads. Take into consideration the frequency with which a lead downloads content from you as well as what they’ve downloaded — white papers, webinars, free trials, e-books. Someone who takes a free trail or demo is probably closer to wanting to make a purchase than someone who only downloaded a white paper.
- Job title. Is the lead a key decision-maker with the power to make purchasing decisions? Determine which positions are your ideal buyer and score accordingly from there.
- Contact information. How much information did they enter into your landing page form? A lead who fills out more than the minimum required fields is probably more interested than someone who simply left their name and email address.
- Pages visited. Consider both the number of pages a lead looked at and which pages they visited. If they’re looking at your pricing and product pages, they’re probably more interested than someone who visited your home page and “about us” page.
These are just a few of the items marketing and sales can score leads on. Have marketing and sales collaborate and agree upon a lead-scoring system. Failure to agree on what constitutes a quality lead can keep sales and marketing from working together to generate the most revenue for your organization.
