6 Tips to Synchronize Marketing and Sales Lead Management

Marketing and sales teams needs to synchronize with each other for lead management, but they still have different approaches, different understandings about leads and their behavior. However, both teams need to be on the same page when it comes to lead management.

Random meetings and discussions are not the best solution synchronization. Instead, both teams need to discuss and create a set guideline that will be applied on daily lead management activities.

Here are six tips that will help sync marketing and sales lead management activities:

1. Create Lead Nurturing Process

Marketing teams may pass on leads that are not sales ready. This happens when the leads are not nurtured properly. The best way to solve this is to create a lead nurturing process that will be followed by marketing to ensure that only sales-ready leads are being passed on. This will maintain a consistent approach.

Create scheduled email campaigns to ensure consistency and flow in communication. Maintain regular emails about the nurturing cycle. Use omni-channel approach to engage with leads, but follow consistency in your messaging. Don’t overflow their inbox or Twitter handle. Provide relevant content that will be useful to attract and engage instead of a random sales pitch. Apply lead segmentation to provide relevant content and information. Segments can be based on web behavior, target market, company size, revenue and more. Monitor, analyze and measure the success rate of every nurturing campaign to see where you stand.

2. Both Quantity and Quality Matters

“The more the merrier” may be a good motto to stand by when finding leads, but if those leads are not converting, then the whole point is lost. Marketing needs to focus on both quantity and quality of leads. Sales needs to focus on nurturing leads that are sales-ready rather than wasting their time with the unqualified leads. That said, if you have more qualified leads, you can use automated email campaigns to nurture all of them at the same time.

3. Use Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a blessing in disguise. It might look like a very lengthy process, but it fetches the best results possible. It is the best process to qualify leads and can be used by both marketing and sales. Use different criteria to score leads: demographics, web behavior, buying pattern, purchase inclination and more.

If you are using CRM to nurture leads, you can automate lead scoring based on various tag values:

• Link click – 5 points
• Email opens – 3 points
• E-book download – 10 points
• Demo request – 25 points

4. Exchange Lead Information

Both the teams should be transparent when it comes to sharing insights and information on the prospects. Lead scoring helps by providing sales-ready leads. Exchanging information helps gain insight about a lead’s buying behavior and purchase inclination. Sales can use this during their follow-up calls and interactions.

• Complete contact information – company size and revenue, target market and social profiles
• Various actions taken on a CTA or forms
• Web behavior information – pages visited, product purchased and any interest in competitor’s product
• Information on email opens, links clicked, content viewed and downloads
• Information on social engagement and activity

5. Track Follow-ups for Any Gaps

The marketing team should continue to track the lead’s purchase progress even after sending the qualified leads to the sales team. This is mainly to track the effectiveness of the sales follow-ups and to understand if there are any communication gaps. Any crack in follow-ups can turn into a missed opportunity.

6. Return Cold Leads to Marketing

Sometimes, even after the nurturing process and lead scoring, a few leads still turn out to be cold. Sales reps should send these leads back to the marketing team and see if they need more nurturing. These odd cases don’t mean the process is moot. However, it is sometimes smart to go back and check if there are any areas that were missed by both teams.

Recycling leads back to the top of the sales funnel isn’t horrible, but it is dependent on marketing and sales working together. They can decide if these leads require more engagement or if they are completely out of order. This would save them time.