SALES INSIGHTS
YOU ’ VE GOT A NEW LEAD . NOW WHAT ?
BY : ANDY BUYTING
I
If your business uses a traditional selling format , your marketing department is in charge of attracting qualified leads and providing them to your sales department . They go through the work of finding a prospect and qualifying them for a potential sale and then pass the baton to your sales team .
This transitory part of the selling process is a real challenge for a lot of companies . We ’ ve even seen it with some of our Client- Partners . These organizations allocate large portions of their budgets to marketing to acquire a sizable number of leads and opportunities . However , once these leads get passed on to sales , they don ’ t get nurtured in the way they need to in order to convert , and the opportunity is lost . In this article , we ’ re going to talk about how to nurture those leads once marketing delivers them and increase your chance of securing the sale .
For many of us , particularly in a business-to-business model , the process of moving leads from marketing to sales is the manual component of your business development assembly line . In our book , Double Sales / Zero Salespeople : Optimize Your Sales and Marketing into One Business Development Strategy That Works , Tulip Media Group ’ s Creative Director , Jessica Embree , and I talk about building your business development assembly line with different stations at every step of the marketing and sales process . When a prospect self-qualifies and moves from the automated portion of your assembly line into the manual portion , that ’ s when you start to actually use your team power to engage with them . At this stage , there are three critical steps for ensuring a smooth transition .
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