What is a Sales-Ready Lead?
According to MarketingSherpa, 61% of B2B marketers directly send all leads to sales without qualifying. If your marketing team is doing the same, then your sales team is wasting a lot of time in chasing dud leads. To make your sales team more effective, you need to generate sales-ready leads.
What is a Sales-Ready Lead?
For effective B2B lead generation, it is necessary that marketing and sales team are in sync. It is important that they have a clear perception of what makes a lead “sales-ready”. Sadly, many times marketing and sales have a different understanding and definition of a sales-ready lead, which can adversely affect revenue growth.
A sales-ready lead is a lead that is pre-qualified and scored by the marketing team for sales using qualifying criteria. These criteria are pre-decided and agreed on by both marketing and sales teams.
Identifying Sales-Ready Lead
According to SiriusDecisions, 4-10% of the marketing leads in your CRM are sales-ready. In order to identify these leads, marketing and sales should jointly define a “sales-ready” lead and decide the criteria for qualification. Different companies have different measurements for what a qualified sales lead should be; for example, companies who have heavy lead flow need more stringent criteria than those who have fewer leads.
Below are some of the criteria you should consider for identifying sales-ready lead:
- Company size
- Industry
- Geography
- Need or issue
- Job title
- Decision making authority
- Genuine interest
- Urgency/timeline
- Sales readiness
- Budget
Why is a Sales-Ready Lead Important?
Statistics show that:
- 50% of qualified marketing leads are not ready to buy
- 79% of the marketing leads never convert into sales
- 65% of the B2B marketers have yet not set up lead nurturing program
- Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads
Sources: Gleanster Research, MarketingSherpa, Forrester Research
The statistics stated above clearly show a disconnect between the marketing and sales team and a primary reason why sales may not not trust marketing. With a little change in your current B2B lead generation process, you can fix this disconnect and generate more quality leads that will convert sooner.
Sales-ready leads not only help you in shortening the sales cycle and increasing revenue, but also enlighten the measure of effectiveness of your scoring and nurturing process.
What are some of the criteria that your company considers for identifying sales-ready lead?
Read more here to get Answers to all your B2B Lead Generation Questions and How to work with a B2B lead generation vendor to generate quality leads while ensuring marketing & sales work in sync