Prevent Costly Leaks in Your Sales Pipeline

Posted by: Lisa Cramer | Posted on: June 22nd, 2011 | 0 Comments

A recent Marketing Sherpa study found that 79% of leads that marketing generates never become sales opportunities.

Do you ever wonder what happens to those leads? Do they have the potential  to become opportunities or are they non qualified to buy?

As most of us would agree, a good percentage of those are quality leads, however, they just may not be ready to buy at this point in time.

What happens in your organization when a lead that looks ready to buy (or not depending on your marketing automation/lead management process) but doesn’t become a sales opportunity?  Do they just sit there in your CRM system and become a competitor’s opportunity later down the road?  The answer is probably yes -  unless you are re-nurturing these leads.

When we talk to prospects, we find it’s still often the norm that sales reps are responsible for nurturing leads.  So in addition to closing business on sales opportunities, they are supposed to use their CRM tool or Outlook to send relevant messages to each prospect.  How will they know what’s relevant for each prospect over time? How will they keep track? How will they prioritize their time with selling opportunities?   How will they know if the prospect interacts with their information? Maybe that’s why in other research Marketing Sherpa found that 64% of Sales and Marketing executives were dissatisfied with the results derived from their nurturing programs.

Marketing needs to take responsibility for re-nurturing leads that were passed to sales but were not ready to become sales opportunities.  With marketing automation technology and the correct lead management process for your organization, marketers can put together effective, relevant nurturing campaigns that appear to come from the sales rep (if you’d like).

Technology provides the tracking, trigger-based nurturing and dynamic content to deliver what’s necessary to move prospects through the cycle until it’s time for a rep to engage again.   As well, with automation you can easily personalize the message so it appears to come from the appropriate sales rep.

Don’t let leads leak out of your funnel, it’s expensive for marketing, sales and your company’s bottom line.