Thursday, October 13, 2011

How to Deal with Not-Yet-Sales-Ready Leads


Till recently B2B marketers focused all their lead generation efforts only on those who have shown interest – companies who have been qualified ‘prospect’, ‘sales-ready’ or ‘marketing-qualified-lead’. However, there is a segment that has been left unattended and ignoring them means that more than three-fourths of the carefully collected lead information is going down the drain.

Ignoring not-yet-sales qualified leads is like having ammunition but not knowing how to shoot. It is the responsibility of the Marketing team to keep in touch with such people to develop a ‘relationship’ first. Also, Marketing will end up spending more time and money to capture lead information on the unqualified ones if they are let off without any action.

Mostly, it is during the interest building stage that these un-qualified ones leak out of the Sales funnel. A simple lack of communication will prevent Sales from working on un-qualified leads because their focus does not deviate from the qualified ones at all. 

Continual communication programs specifically designed for the unqualified ones can be executed to keep them informed, irrespective of whether they are responding.Another main reason for not adequately addressing the not-yet-qualified leads is because of the age old divide between Sales and Marketing.

So, most of the time no action is taken on these leads because there are not enough marketing campaigns targeted by Marketing, and Sales refuses to pick them because they are unqualified.

Keeping a process in place within the lead management system to address such leads will surely go a long way in bringing in more leads for the company.

Since lead generation is a process oriented effort requires to be measured consistently so that process improvements can be implemented at every milestone. Here, milestones of lead generation would ideally mean the transition points of prospects.

The following analytics can be drawn from lead generation efforts.
  • Number of Indentified Leads vs. Total Visited
  • Number of Qualified Leads vs. Total Identified Leads
  • Number of Sale-ready vs. Number of Qualified Leads
  • Cost of campaign per lead
  • Success rate of Lead Conversion to Customer


Apart from this, companies need to constantly monitor metrics, using robust lead management software, related to the geographical background of leads, behavioral aspects, visitor intent identification parameters, etc. Simultaneously, it is vital to regularly follow-up with leads, whether they have been qualified or not.

Know more -  marketing automation software & lead generation software

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