Determining Sales Readiness
Time is your scarcest resource. Timing is everything. Whether you are personally both the marketer and sales rep or have other people in these roles, you need to know when Marketing should deem a lead is ready to talk with Sales.
In the digital age, you’ll need some insights so you can connect with the prospect at the right time, in the right way. Just because someone completes a form on your website, they still may not be ready for your selling effort. Starting to sell when the prospect isn’t ready is not only a waste of your time but can also turn off the lead to you in the future.
Doing the Two-Step
Marketing and Sales, to most people, are very similar, if not actually the same. They may not have needed to give much thought to how these compare. You can hardly blame them!
But of course, these two disciplines work in tandem. Marketing’s responsibility is to deliver leads to Sales. Sales’ responsibility is to move the prospects through a process that results in a customer buying from you.
How do you know when Marketing is ‘finished’ and it’s time for Sales to take over? This is called sales readiness- the point at which a prospect is ready for your sales rep to approach.
Team Effort
For a marketing campaign to be properly planned, it needs to have goals, and actions to achieve the goals. Right from the beginning of a marketing campaign’s planning, Sales has a role.
Sales has to understand the marketing campaign and define when a lead from the campaign should be turned over to Sales. This teaming keeps everyone aware of what each of these organizations is going to do to A) reach leads; B) nurture leads; C) qualify leads; D) close sales.
Sales can contribute a lot to a campaign. Sales can help Marketing to understand what actions to ask audience members to take, and which indicate the audience member is ready to speak with a seller. This helps Marketing to plan how to nurture a lead over time. They want to escalate the level of engagement with the lead until the lead has completed enough actions or a key single key action.
One manufacturer I have worked with had only a single form on their website. When a prospect completed this, they are asking for a seller to contact them about a need they have. And that was enough. So they did very little lead nurturing.
Most businesses capture as many leads from their audience as they can. And here is where nurturing a lead as part of a campaign begins. The goal of lead nurturing is to keep your brand in front of the lead. Later, when they are in the market for what you sell, they should either contact you or at least revisit your website.
Nurture v. Nature
It’s in our nature to forget about things as time goes on. That person who saw your email about a blog post clicked on the link and read the post. “Interesting,” they thought. They weren’t then in the market for what you make. But they did download a datasheet after filling out your online form.
Marketing will anticipate this situation. During planning of the campaign, they talked with Sales. Sales said for your business, a lead who simply reads a blog post and downloads a form in one day is not enough to signal a rep should spend time on this one. After the first email, some weeks pass.
Marketing sees that other leads have acted similarly. Definitely some response, but nothing indicating most leads appear ready for Sales to engage. These leads are automatically scored. The marketing automation system increases their sales readiness score with additional actions they take.
As part of the campaign, Marketing included another initiative. This is aimed at the leads who opened and clicked on the link in the email but don’t score high enough to be deemed sales-ready. Sometime later, Marketing automatically sends out follow up emails to anyone who has downloaded a data sheet. The email reminds them they did so and asking them to, for example, rate their perception of quality on a two-question online survey. (Quality is a brand pillar for this manufacturer.)
To help keep these leads engaged, AKA nurtured, Marketing has also planned an event. They are taking the approach that educating the lead gets a greater response than selling these leads. They develop a 30-minute webinar that explains the differences in material choices and when one is better than the other. The Marketing team sends out an email inviting the leads in this campaign to register on your site and view the recorded webinar.
On the webinar registration thank-you page is another offer. This is intended to escalate the leads’ level of action and motivate them to consider more strongly buying from your company. This is a first attempt to test the leads’ sales readiness. The thank-you page asks the lead to schedule a meeting time with your seller. It is targeted only at the leads who have done at least two of the actions offered so far.
During the campaign planning, Sales said that a lead who has taken these three steps (datasheet download, survey, and webinar registration) in a given time should be ready to talk with one of your sellers. Sales told Marketing that customers you sell to order four to six times each year, so two months is the right length to have Marketing pushing for a close. (In this scenario, close means ready to talk to your seller.)
Any lead who has done at least three of these four actions, according to Sales leadership, is a good prospect for sales to contact.
Close Can be Good, Too
As a secondary indicator of sales readiness, Sales leadership has said that any lead who downloaded the datasheet and completed a quality survey with favorable marks is also a worthwhile prospect. The lead-scoring strategy assigns these actions higher point values.
Notice I didn’t say you can have only one definition. Because we are dealing with humans, we need to make allowances. You need to stay flexible. Try moving the line on different campaigns. Sometimes Sales will do better by contacting the lead earlier, and sometimes not.
You can see from the above scenario that having a definition of sales-ready is a valuable approach to Marketing and Sales management. In today’s online marketing world, people generally expect that they will contact you when they are ready to talk to you. In a business-to-business environment, especially competitive ones, you may need to be more assertive. It’s a balancing act that you need to understand and plan for. Call too early and you risk wasting time and alienating your lead. Wait too long and a competitor may already be taking the order. There is a happy medium.
Work with your team to think through the point at which you want to move a lead from Marketing to Sales. Lead scoring allows your organization to have a common language that defines this. With lead scoring, you’ll be able to keep your sales efforts focused on those prospects who are ready to buy. It will allow you to continue marketing to the others until they are ready. And it will allow you to operate this critical part of your business with a higher degree of confidence and results.
