Ah, the holiday season is upon us! We have been feeling a bit festive, so we’ve taken the opportunity to demonstrate the typical cycle of an underwhelming lead generation process… to the tune of one of our Christmas favorites! Can you relate?

On the 12^th day of Christmas, marketing gave to me …

• 12 Trade Show Contacts
  • Infamous for their typical lack of quality, trade show leads are some of the least followed-up leads that exist. Often times, sales people completely ignore trade show leads because they know that these people have not even been partially qualified. Make sure you have a strategy in place to efficiently nurture and qualify trade show leads.
• 11 Unopened Emails
  • If you have emails that aren’t being read, something is obviously wrong. Actively experiment with your subject lines, and be creative. And if you are being ignored via email by your contacts, it might be a good idea to try another method of communication. Unopened emails don’t always translate into an uninterested contact.
• 10 Missed Opportunities
  • Make sure your marketing team has methods or processes in place to ensure you won’t miss out on opportunities. In some cases, prospects are interested, but they aren’t ready to make a purchase. If you add nurturing to your lead generation efforts, your lead quality will increase, and your company could enjoy a 200-300% increase in sales in 90-180 days.
• 9 Unqualified Leads
  • If your marketing team is passing along all leads to sales, then they’re doing it wrong. Fewer leads (that are actually qualified) are better for sales teams because they don’t waste the team’s time and energy the way unqualified leads do. Building trust between sales and marketing is only one of the critical reasons for qualifying leads.
• 8 Questions About Following-Up
  • Nothing is more annoying for a salesperson than a marketer asking if sales has followed up with the poor-quality leads they are getting. Marketers don’t understand how they are making sales people’s lives difficult with unqualified leads, and sales people don’t understand why marketers continue to send them bad leads. Until proper alignment between the two departments occurs, the cycle of frustration will continue.
• 7 Cold Call Leads
  • Now this is an interesting one, because cold calling isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Cold calling with the intent of selling is a bad thing. Cold calling with the intent of prospecting is an aspect of outbound marketing. Make sure you’re strategic about your cold calling, and work with marketing to generate a supportive “next steps” process to nurture your contacts.
• 6 Missed Appointments
  • Don’t get caught paying for appointments that don’t drive results. Setting appointments doesn’t drive meaningful conversations. Don’t get stuck in the appointment setting trap.
• 5 GOLD-EN LEADS
  • Isn’t it nice when you get feasible sales-ready opportunities from marketing? Don’t let these leads go to waste!
• 4 Meaningful Conversations
  • Sales people need to be able to weave a meaningful conversation into their prospecting. Asking discovery questions about current problems or difficulties is a great way to get your foot in the door and grab the attention of your contact.
• 3 Great Opportunities
  • You’ve gotten three awesome opportunities from marketing?! You’re nearly there! Make sure you continue to support the buyer’s journey at their pace by answering questions about what they want versus what is important to them. If you are asking the right questions then three things can happen:
    • Your prospects will open up about what their problems are and they will qualify themselves.
    • You can understand how your company will be able to help them.
    • You open the doors up for future opportunities to assist them.

• 2 Sales Qualified Leads
  • Marketing sent over two leads that are ready to talk? Someone pinch me!
• & A Single Closed Business Deal

The above is a testament to what it can take to close a B2B business deal. Don’t let your sales team be a victim of an outdated marketing automation program. Align your sales and marketing departments, or continue to see your sales opportunities go to your competitors.