With little visibility into B2B lead generation, sales pipeline management, conversions, and customer satisfaction, management often finds the traditional sales process frustrating. Marketing prefers to manage the entire prospect database, email and nurturing campaigns, and even CRM, but in real business situations, the sales team handles these responsibilities. While sales heavily use the prospect database for inside sales campaigns, the sales team typically lacks time to keep the database current. Sales reps naturally pursue hot leads and often overlook not-yet-ready leads that marketing can nurture through lead nurturing and scoring campaigns. This situation worsens if a company hires a lead generation company without ensuring synchronization between its in-house marketing and sales teams.
The following grey areas need special attention when working with a B2B lead generation vendor.
1.Prospect List Management
Generally lead generation companies should not need lists, but some vendors will ask companies to provide them with a list of prospects. Marketing and sales teams together need to ensure that the prospect list they provide their vendor is most accurate. If the vendor uses their own lists, review them carefully to avoid targeting wrong or existing companies.
2.Inside Sales and Marketing Campaigns – Planning, Execution, Call Follow Up and Database Update
You must train the cold-calling reps before starting inside sales and marketing campaigns. The sales team should lead this process to build rapport with inside sales reps. Provide reps with a marketing deck, presentation, and case studies to educate them. Also, please give them a call script that lists all the essential qualifying criteria to avoid confusion during cold calling. Conduct role-play scenarios during inside sales training to enhance their skills. Once trained on tele-calling, please provide them with list management and reporting instructions.
Your marketing team should help the lead generation vendor in marketing campaigns management such as email and event marketing campaigns. You should give them sample messaging for email campaigns and final approval for the test campaign. Marketing teams should route all the inbound inquiries to the vendor for follow up and qualification.
Qualified or warm leads should be tracked and rechecked even if the vendor is responsible for the updates on your CRM.
3.Lead Nurturing Campaigns – Planning, Execution and Reporting
If the inside sales vendor manages lead nurturing, marketing must route all cold and not-yet-ready leads to them. Also all drop off leads from sales needs to go to the nurturing pipeline to be worked on when ready. Sales and marketing should help the vendor finalize lead scoring and nurturing parameters based on the target market.
4.CRM/Database Update and Management
Five out of 10 companies face the problem of sales not updating the CRM system. When hiring a lead generation company to manage your CRM, sales and IT must restrict vendor access, limiting permissions like deleting leads or accessing accounts. Make sure the marketing team approves verified lists before uploading them into the CRM. The sales team should thoroughly track all leads and accept or reject after-sales follow-up.
For more information about aMarketForce B2B lead generation services email us at info@amarketforce.com
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