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coreconcepts

{ qualified leads }

marketingnews

05.15.08

By ElisaBEth a. sullivan//Staff Writer

Take The (qualified) lead

A busIness CArD Is not A hot prospeCt
When it comes to generating new business, marketers usually concern themselves with alerting potential customers to their companies existence and generating enough interest to get those would-be clients in the door. But more and more, marketers are also held accountable for bringing in the right customers from whom the sales team can turn a profit, not just inquiries but qualified leads that have a genuine chance of panning out. The definition of a lead varies from company to companyand quite often from department to departmentbut at its most basic, a lead is a potential customer who has expressed interest in your product or service and who has demonstrated a need that your company could help fill, says Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch Inc., a business-to-business lead generation and management firm based in Arden Hills, Minn., and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. I define a lead as what a sales person would call an opportunity, he says. There are more words to use for a lead than Eskimos have words for snow, says Doug Barth, CEO of SimplyDIRECT Inc., a Sudbury, Mass.-based lead generation and marketing database provider with clients including MarkMonitor and IBM. For some companies, a name with a title attached is considered a lead, but a lead has to have some sort of qualification to it, he says. The lead really should mean that the person has reacted to your pitch; they have reacted to your business proposition. More than just an inquiry, or an interested party who requests information, a lead is a would-be customer who is measured against a series of criteria established by your company. And those leads that fit the criteriaand are therefore deemed worthy for your sales team to pursueare called qualified leads. But theres often a disconnect between the marketing and sales departments, each of which may have its own definition of a qualified lead. While marketers may define a lead theoreticallyexclusively based on the companys profile of an ideal customer, say, or worse, simply based on the leads expressed interest, whether or not that lead is actually viablesales reps often define a lead as a readymade opportunity to close a deal, Carroll says. Marketers should consider the sales reps to be their customers, he says, giving them what they need to succeed. We as marketers are trying to positively impact the pipeline, Carroll says. The point is to free up time for sales people to spend time with leads that will be profitable, rather than feeding them raw leads or simple inquiries. Its a quality over quantity game, he says. Better marketing leads mean more sales that can be directly attributed to marketing efforts the trackable ROI that marketers need. Marketers and sales reps should establish an agreed-upon definition of a qualified lead, and should meet regularly to ensure that the criteria for qualified leads are still relevant and are flexible enough to pertain to the companys various lead-generating goals. To filter out the qualified leads from those with less potential, companies often loosely follow a framework of criteria known as BANTS, which stands for budget, authority, need, timeframe and size, according to M.H. Mac McIntosh, a North Kingstown, R.I.-based b-to-b marketing consultant:
Does the prospect have a budget? Does the lead have the authority to make a buying decision, or is he in a position to influence the decision? Is there a demonstrable need or an application for your product or service? What is the leads proposed timeframe for making the purchase and implementing your product or service? What is the size of the opportunity, and does it fit your offerings? (Carroll says the s stands for sales-ready, which, of course, is equally important.)

Other criteria are often necessary, but BANTS is a good place to start, McIntosh says. Many companies also rely on a lead scoring system in which lead qualification criteria are each assigned a point value, and leads that hit a predetermined minimum number of points are passed on to the sales team as qualified leads. Marketers might be hesitant to take ownership of the lead generation process, but it bodes well for them to do so, McIntosh says. In the old days, the marketers role was getting an inquiry and then passing it on to sales as a lead, he says. Marketers used to plant the seeds, initiating the lead generation process but leaving any lead nurturing to the sales team. Today a marketers role is to be in charge of the entire orchard. Marketers must water, weed and feed the leadsinitiating the lead generation process, weeding out the good leads from the bad and then helping those good leads to maturethereby freeing up the sales team to close the deal, he says. Sales people are the fruit pickers. A fruit orchard analogy from a man named McIntosh. How apropos. But the analogy is a good one. Especially when budgets are tight and marketers have to do more with less, or the same with less, they have to look at things that will move the sales needle, McIntosh says. CEOs want concrete results from their marketing investments, and anything that we can show in ROI, theyll keep funding. m

qualifiedleads//cc