Lyons Leadership

The sales departments of IT companies are under enormous pressure to make their figures and this leads them to overlook any opportunity that is unlikely to be translated into a short term sale. However, many marketing departments do not supply qualified leads as raw material, but only inquiries. The difference is important: an inquiry is someone who seeks information about our company or products, but that is not a lead. A lead is only when it has been qualified.

Research has shown that as much as 5 to15% of the inquiries turn into real sales. Whenever your sales people receive inquiries instead of sales leads, they will be wasting their time and your company’s valuable resources. In the meantime, your sales staff will grow distrustful of the so-called sales leads they are given.

The best way to solve these problems is to efficiently manage sales leads. Many studies have proven that making efforts to improve the quality of the sales leads that your sales department receives, results in higher closing ratios. The key here is to increase the quality of sales leads.

However you decide to do it, the most important thing is that the definition is agreed upon and accepted by all concerned parties and that it has all the specifics of the type of product and what needs it covers, of the customers that they are marketed to, their purchasing processes, and the vendor and its sales process.

The criteria you will use to define what constitutes a good lead has great implication on which of those leads will be later monitored and be nurtured by the marketing department. They will be taken to be developed and turned into sales-ready leads.

On the contrary, not implementing a formal definition of what the company is a good lead on which they agree upon in terms of sales and marketing ends up in frictions and mistrust between the two departments, for wasting sellers’ time and marketing resources on monitoring or the generation of useless leads and ultimately, failure to achieve the business goals.