Inbound Lead Qualification: Making Your Sales Team Love You

You’re a marketer and your keyword optimized landing pages with the perfect layout has started to deliver great responses in the form of 500 inbound leads a week which you have passed on to your counter part in the sales department. You’re thinking to yourself “He should love me for this!” and instead at the next sales meeting you still hear him talking about how they are not getting the kind of leads they need. Shocking? Not really because this is a common scenario seen across companies when it comes to inbound leads.

Inbound leads especially from online channels are known to be amongst the best leads which higher conversation chances as compared to other sources like email marketing and cold calling. However there is a difference between an “inbound lead” which is information which came through a sign up, a download or form fill and a “qualified inbound lead” where that lead has been contacted and qualified for a possible requirement or interest in buying. If you can take that extra step to have the inbound leads qualified and deliver a smaller more concise list of leads, your sales team will love you for it. It allows them to filter out the noise and focus their energies on converting a smaller number of leads with a greater propensity to buy rather than a larger list of names, email ids and phone numbers for them to sift through to find a qualified lead who is worth the time and effort they have to spend on it.

Having a rock solid lead management process for quickly qualifying every inbound lead that comes through the funnel is essential and requires a dedicated effort. Whether its done by marketing or sales it’s clear that it has to be done by someone and once the process is in place the conversion rate into end customers and results will show for themselves. The process also helps marketers get clearer metrics on how effective are the leads they are generating from their campaigns in terms of quality and not just the volumes being generated. Put in that inbound lead qualification process before you deliver them to sales. They will love you for it.

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