01 Jun Generating the RIGHT leads (the right audience)

Marketing is obviously designed to generate leads – without doing that, there’s not a huge amount of point to it. The difficulty is in ensuring that the leads that are generated are the right ones, the ones that will convert into paying customers, the ones that won’t waste your time.

To get the right leads in the first place, your marketing activities need to be aimed at the right audience – the one that your sales and marketing team worked together to define.

But marketing is more than just creating some leads and leaving everything to the sales team to follow up. Marketing should be supporting the sales activities, and nurturing the potential new customer, throughout the whole buying process.

Sales and marketing teams should work together to agree a method of ranking or cataloguing leads. Once a new lead comes in they can be ranked according to the agreed method, making the next steps far clearer in terms of which team takes ownership of the lead at any one time.

New leads, very early on in the buying cycle, may not be ready to make a firm decision, and need lots of information and handholding – an ideal stage for marketing to take the reins. Nurturing that lead, providing information, and remaining in regular communication, is a perfect fit with marketing activities.

As leads get closer to buying, or where they have more complex needs, or even where they are a more high profile client, the sales team should step in. At this stage the lead is much more likely to buy, and the sales team can start leveraging the marketing communications and brand profile to close the sale.

Thanks to our guest blogger Sofia Dahlqvist – Managing Director of 55 Connect Ltd