SUMMARY: You tirelessly generate lead after lead – but the sales team does nothing about it? And then you have to justify yourself that your campaigns don’t bring in any revenue? You don’t have to experience this frustration anymore: Read this article to find out how to make your sales team happy with Lead Qualification & Pre-Sales. In a free expert meeting, we evaluate your individual challenges.
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About Leadvolution
Leadvolution is one of the most experienced social media B2B marketers in Europe with over 140 advertising setups for fast growing startups, exciting SMEs and over 25 global market leaders. Within 4-6 weeks we build a globally scalable social media lead generation for very specific & complex B2B target groups for clients, generating up to 500 leads/month. Read More
About Leadvolution
Leadvolution is one of the most experienced social media B2B marketers in Europe with over 140 advertising setups for fast growing startups, exciting SMEs and over 25 global market leaders. Within 4-6 weeks we build a globally scalable social media lead generation for very specific & complex B2B target groups for clients, generating up to 500 leads/month. Read More
The problem: Leads hard-earned in marketing often fall by the wayside in sales
Do you know this? You generate leads in marketing with great effort and enormous costs. Then you hopefully pass them on to the sales team. What happens next? You hear nothing more. Why is that? Sales staff in B2B companies are usually used to dealing with few, but very specific enquiries. They maintain their personal customer contacts, and the new leads often already have a high level of interest because they actively approach the sales team on their own initiative.
If you successfully conduct digital B2B marketing, you confront your sales department with significantly more leads who are often only superficially interested. So, the salesperson is now faced with a large pile of prospects of very different quality without a personal starting point. This is unusual and uncomfortable for him and means much more communication effort than usual. He is annoyed by the unresponsive and “maybes” who clog up his sales pipeline. It is clear that many salespeople then prefer to take care of their usual customers.
Thus, your leads disappear somewhere in the CRM without any chance of a reasonable ROI. You are constantly busy following up – and then you may even end up being asked if you are really doing a good job when all you seem to be delivering are bad leads. This is frustrating.
Instead of pushing, support - with Lead Qualification & Pre-Sales
Your sales team is very valuable because they often maintain relationships with your customers for decades and thus guarantee a stable order situation. Changing such a well-established structure can quickly lead to dissatisfaction. Most of the time it simply doesn’t work because it requires a fundamentally different type of personality to deal with concrete enquiries in detail than to process many requests, to get people talking and to discover with them the essential business-relevant needs that are the basis for a concrete query.
In the worst case, your employees are so busy dealing with the new issue that they no longer pursue their normal activities to the necessary extent. The result is falling turnover.
Never change a running system! Let your sales team do exactly what they are good at: turning quality leads into customers. All you have to do is support your sales team: deliver them the leads from your marketing measures in the usual quality.
Would you like to learn more? Arrange a free expert call here with 1 click.
Pre-sales refines marketing leads into concrete enquiries
In parallel to digital lead generation, you should build a pre-sales team (either in-house or as an external service). This team increases interest in your product and sorts out the really important customers from your funnel.
In this way, your sales department will receive more leads of the usual high quality without having to change processes or mindset. This is the necessary interface between marketing and sales to sustainably refine the leads that initially appear superficial. To do this, the pre-sales agents use clearly defined processes: they guide each lead through various qualification stages efficiently and transparently, automated by appropriate software tools.
At each new stage, they collect defined information. This includes questions such as: “Does the lead generally fit my company?”; “Does he have enough budget to afford our products?”; “Does he also have the necessary decision-making authority in his company?”; “What is their time horizon?” etc.
Those who fulfill all the conditions are handed over to the sales department. This is done, for example, by making a concrete appointment for a meeting with a sales employee.
Marketing & Sales Automation helps you achieve the necessary efficiency
Parallel to lead qualification, Pre-Sales takes care of lead nurturing – also by means of retargeting. This means: the team creates automated workflows and thus provides each lead with relevant information in an automated way to stimulate interest. This is also often not a strength of existing sales teams – nor is it their job. The necessary implementation of corresponding processes for lead qualification and lead nurturing would completely overwhelm them.
Ideally, the processes are integrated into the company’s own CRM. With appropriate reporting, marketing is always informed about the results and can control its campaigns based on ROI. This means you no longer have to tediously follow up on what has become of your leads. And most importantly, the revenue potential for the company from campaigns finally becomes visible and you can optimize your budgets accordingly.
Important: The pre-sales team can also carry out automated campaigns for existing customers. Especially in times of declining new orders, you can generate attractive additional sales in the service sector at short notice. Would you like to know which approaches to marketing automation can bring you rapid added value? Then arrange a free expert consultation with us here.
The right approach ensures higher quality leads
Classically, leads are often generated by means of general, informative whitepapers, which also often achieve good conversion rates. However, the salesperson has a lot of work and frustration with such leads, because the concrete product interest must first be aroused – and he or she may be given short shrift when calling because the customer does not want to be called.
Instead, rely on ad texts that generate a concrete product interest in 5-15 seconds. This way you will achieve a comparable or even higher conversion rate than with whitepaper campaigns – and at the same time significantly higher lead quality.
To achieve this, proceed as follows:
- Identify all the relevant pain points for your target group that you can solve with your product.
- Then record the consequences that result from the pain points, in each case for specific job profiles that you want to reach with your campaigns.
- Then you quantify the results that your target groups can achieve with your product, define buying obstacles and collect arguments to overcome them in your communication.
- And finally, collect references to your company.
The good thing about this: if the customer has already understood the added value he can achieve with a product and actively requests further information, this is the perfect bridge for your sales. Such a lead is therefore much more valuable than someone who was only interested in a generally informative whitepaper.
We are happy to accompany you in this process – with the ReThink180™ methodology we have developed. In doing so, we generate a variety of convincing messaging approaches in just one or two interview sessions and prepare them efficiently as part of an orderly process.
Would you like to discuss individual questions? Simply request a free expert discussion:
Together with you, we evaluate individual potentials for your company and figure out how you can efficiently generate, qualify, and develop leads. We define a point at which we hand over the customer to your sales department, for example a concrete appointment. To do this, we set up an interface to your CRM so that your sales department has access to all the information we collect. Alternatively, we set up a separate pre-sales team in your company with the corresponding process implementation.