Inside Sales Lead Management Featured Article

When it comes to lead management, many (dare we say most?) organizations will admit to a bit of a communications breakdown. Sales and marketing are often engaged in a struggle for territory, and the odd man out often winds up being lead management. The problem is that the two departments’ overlapping functionality sometimes creates gaps. And it is potential customers that are falling into those gaps.

“Marketing works hard to create leads – prospects that have shown some defined level of interest in your solution and are willing to talk to you,” wrote Debbie Qaqish in an article for Business2Community recently. “Most marketers feel that once a prospect has completed a form or has achieved a certain ‘lead score’ defined by a combination of explicit data and online behavior, the lead should go straight to sales. Job done!”

As far as the sales department is concerned, however, the job isn’t always done. The sales team may be in crunch mode working on another set of leads. They may be unhappy with the quality of leads. The leads may not be coming in in a way that makes sense to sales for effective follow-up. Suddenly, the marketing department is unhappy that sales teams seem to be ignoring their hard work, and the sales team is unhappy with the overall quality and quantity of leads. The battle continues, and ends up as a lot of wasted time and resources.

According to Qaqish, the most successful companies – the ones that create a measurable impact with their lead generation programs  -- do the following: they provide marketing with its own lead qualifying team, and sales and marketing work together, with all work around lead generation fully shared.

“Most importantly, there is a vested and financial interest in both parties for leads to become opportunities and to close,” she wrote.

For sales managers, this means making a to-do list of tasks that includes (but isn’t limited to) fostering full-scale collaboration between sales and marketing in a way that optimizes processes; building the right team with the right skills to support lead management; aligning and compensating according to lead-generation goals; putting the right technologies in place and ensuring both departments use them, and being an outspoken advocate for marketing’s role in lead generation.

Once the sales manager and marketing personnel have created a cooperative process for lead generation, it’s important to put in place a way to monitor it, measure it and quickly identify problems and bottlenecks. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that sales and marketing won’t occasionally fall back into old habits, but with a cross-departmental lead management process in place, these bad habits will be easier to correct.