Step Four: Passing on Leads to Sales

Once you have gone to the effort to phone your leads and qualify them, the next stage becomes vitally important. Passing on to the sales team. All your time and investment can go down the pan if this is not done carefully and correctly.

There are five tips I can give you to help safeguard this step:

1. The lead is truly sales-ready. This means all the information needed has been found and entered by the marketing team. This is not the responsibility of the sales team!

2. A phone or in-person appointment has been arranged by the marketing team on behalf of the sales staff.

3. The lead contact has been informed, as a matter of courtesy, that they are being passed over to sales.

4. Detailed information on each sales-ready lead is passed directly from the marketing team to the sales team. any relevant infrmation which is not on the database should be included, e.g. phonecall notes.

5. The leads have been successfully installed on the sales database.

However arduous or longwinded it may seem it’s important to be meticulous when passing leads to the sales team. This is not the time to be cutting corners by leaving blank spaces in the database, or withholding phonecall notes. Any sloppy routines will lead to missed sales opportunities and damage the firm’s reputation if people receive poor service.

I heard of a company recently whose marketing team was concerned that the sales department wasn’t acting on their inquiries (which they called leads). The sales team’s processes were shrouded in mystery. No one except the sales team knew what was going on until a proposal or sale happened. Even worse, though, many ‘leads’ that went to sales were never heard of again. The marketing team was unable to review its work and decide whether it was being effective.

After discussion, it was agreed that the sales team did not have the incentive to motivate them to carry out the process of lead qualification, and a new lead generation/qualification program was started. The new system also took advantage of the impact that swift lead follow-up has on revenue. All inquiries are centrally qualified by phone using the firm’s agreed lead definition within 2 hours and passed to the sales team, which then pursues web inquiries in 4-8 hours.

In the instance of the qualified lead which is not reviewed or followed up by the dedicated salesperson within 24 hours, this salesperson will receive a call from the sales manager. Such leads are automatically marked up in the CRM system. If a sales lead goes more than 48 hours before being dealt with, the dedicated salesperson may have the lead passed to a colleague.

Some may find this harsh, but it’s effective. This firm now has a lead conversion rate triple that of similar companies, and is able to access detailed information about exactly how many marketing-generated leads are being followed at any time.