Who qualifies leads: Sales or Marketing?

Most people say that lead qualification is Marketing's job. And in B2B organizations, it has been. But as a matter of practice in the organizations I speak and work with, the resources in Marketing who deal with sourcing leads and pushing them to Sales are pretty slim.

In reality, Sales is doing a bunch of the lead qualification work including jobs that are clearly better served by Marketing. And without support or training, they're not doing them very well. For example, I know companies in which sales people are still drafting form letters and then copying and pasting them to their lead list.

On the other hand, in cases where Marketing has the bandwidth to nurture leads at least a little, the pattern tends to go like this: Marketing goes to a trade show, gets a bunch of leads, sends them a few emails and then dumps them on Sales. If you're lucky, Sales follows up and records some information about each lead's personal preferences and eventually makes a sale, but that means that Sales is really qualifying the lead.

Since Sales is already qualifying leads, and since they're the best prepared to understand when a lead is ready to become a customer, why not set them up with the best information possible and let them do that task?

Sales should have access to a system in which they could open an interest profile for a lead and see all the information that lead received or researched on your website. They should be able to sort these leads to see who's hottest and decide when and how to contact that lead.

Marketing, meanwhile, could focus on its strengths to create and maintain a 12-month email campaign, rather than recreating the wheel with each new group of leads. As leads are added to the system, they'd begin to receive monthly emails and Sales could pull them from the lead nurturing program as they become customers.

Let Marketing nurture and Sales qualify, but provide a common view into the pool of leads for both organizations. Good CRM for Marketing software will automate the updating of this pool so that neither group is saddled with that task or blame if it fails to happen.

Give Sales actionable intelligence to build the relationship with the lead and let them qualify that opportunity.

Comments

[Jose Palomino]

Kim Albee has captured a consistent reality in even the largest companies. Amazing - but true. Businesses are smashing silos everywhere in their organizations - except between Sales and Marketing.

Thanks for a very concise and powerful post.

[Kim Albee]

Thanks for the post! The challenge is how to transition organizations in a way that enables the alignment of Sales & Marketing - and I think technology is a must-have for this transition.

Kim :-)

[Darin Dixon]

It is unbelievable the gap that still exiests between marketing and sales, especially when it comes to lead qualification. Our company went to a large marketing conference that was held in Chicago and in San Francisco, and most companies were still in the fog trying to decide what to do with this issue. The last commentor, Kim, pointed out something very important, TECHNOLOGY. We have also found that having the right automated process to callback and email leads quickly and often has had a tremendous effect on qualification rate. We've seen qualification rates double and triple when technology is used to bridge the gap between sales and marketing by systematically contacting leads.

[Kim Albee]

Thanks for the insight and sharing what you're seeing. In a briefing with Forrester we had recently, we asked about the size of the market for technology that enables this, and the Sr. Analyst said that it's hard to tell because it's an emerging market, but they're sizing the market similar to the CRM market (between $1-4 billion). Your comment and insights echo the emerging nature and the grappling companies are doing with sorting it out.

Kim :-)