B2B Conversations Now

I’ve heard the term “sales ready lead” along with “nurturing” and “drip” marketing” mentioned many times over the past few months in B2B marketing circles and decided to figure out exactly what they mean.  As a B2B sales person myself for 20 years I know what works and what doesn’t and I’m skeptical of anything that sounds “slow”.  What I’ve found is that there is often a disparity between a sales and marketing definition of sales ready lead (which I’ve also seen discussed at length and seems to be at the core of the issue).

A sales person’s definition of a sales ready lead:

“A sales ready lead is any prospect that has a business problem your company can solve at a price it can afford, now or in the future.”

A marketer’s definition (from my observation, please correct me):

“A sales ready lead is any prospect that has achieved sufficient lead rank over time based on pre-defined criteria and is ready to buy.”

What I take away from the marketers version is that until the prospect is ready to buy they should not be passed to sales, correct?  Please chime in with your own definitions but if this is correct then marketers may be costing their companys sales revenue, and here’s why:

Businesses that are far enough along in the B2B sales cycle and are ready to purchase made their decision weeks or months before.  Sales people have a saying,  “If you get a Request for Proposal and you didn’t know about it, throw it in the trash; your competitor wrote it.”  The key to successful selling is helping define the RFP in the first place.  If a good prospect is mistakenly held onto by marketing, you may run the risk of losing the deal because the sales team was not engaged early enough to influence the decision criteria.

So the tough question becomes, how do you filter out the leads that want to buy now or in the future?

I’ll share a simple technique that has served me well over the years in Part 2.

Tags: B2B Marketing, B2B Sales, Lead Generation //