Overview
Having a game plan on how to transform leads into paying customers is not as easy as it sounds. It’s all about getting your marketing and sales team working in perfect harmony and establishing a seamless system everyone can agree with.
What a lot of companies lack nowadays is a solid communication channel between these two separate teams. The marketing guys may pass down weak leads that create a selling nightmare for your salespersons. On the other hand, your sales team may also be overlooking or ignoring strong MQLs.
If only you can get these guys on the same wavelength, then you will see a significant increase in revenue.
Fortunately, there is a 4-step strategy that will help you fix these problems or avoid them altogether.
Build a Single Team through Communication
Starting with the basic need of every organization, you need to ensure that your company is encouraging constant and clear communication between your people. You need to clear any confusion between the roles of your teams.
Keep in mind that the role of your marketing team is all about reaching people. They are the backbone of your company’s authority to your market. They are also responsible for optimizing your lead generation channels. On the other hand, the sales force is all about securing deals, especially when handling large or important accounts.
If it’s still possible, consider having an open office or a similar layout to promote better communication. You may also host weekly or bi-monthly meetings between the teams and allow them to discuss the key processes. Encourage KT (Knowledge Transfer) to educate your marketing team on what paying customers actually need to know and your sales team on spotting the strongest lead channels.
Establish a Lead Scoring System
Once you establish constant or close communication between sales and marketing, you can leverage this to develop an effective lead scoring system.
A lead scoring system basically ranks your prospects so that your sales force can prioritize them accordingly. This warrants the comparison of lead channels such as email subscribers, social media followers, outreach respondents, and how they grow as they get to know your company. While it sounds like a job for your marketing team, it works much better with the input of salespersons.
For example, a direct enquiry via phone call should be prioritized more over newsletter subscribers, while social media followers should be somewhere in the middle. Your sales team should have access to the definitive demographics of past customers, which should allow you to fine-tune your lead scoring system.
Develop Recency & Frequency
When it comes to digital marketing, you can use the recency and frequency values to help you identify your best customers or tweak your remarketing campaign to suit their behavior. Basically, customers who’ve recently bought from you are more likely to purchase again than those who’ve become stagnant while customers who buy frequently are likely to retain the same purchasing behavior.
You can build both recency and frequency through various content marketing approaches. The scope should include timely remarketing emails, ads on GDN-listed websites (Google Display Network), and social media posts. Again, the collaboration of your marketing and sales teams will be needed here. Not only will these keep your brand on the minds of your customers, effective content marketing will also cultivate trust.
React Fast
Yes – the communication flow between your teams is crucial, but so is customer relationship. If you already have an optimized system that filters strong leads, it can become difficult whom to respond first.
Most able companies utilize CRM software to handle or automate the collection of customer data. But even so, you still need a living person to do the number crunching and spot the ripest ones. With this being said, you should consider hiring sales department representatives to guarantee that the leads on top of the lead score hierarchy gets first dibs.
The bottom line is this: keep your organization’s communication alive, develop a system that sifts through your prospects, and grab those prospects while they’re hot. Remember that a considerable amount of leads will need a little extra push before they purchase. So if you’re standing there waiting for your customers to close transactions for you, then you’re missing out on a lot.
