Despite the pursuit of the same end goal, sales and marketing teams often find themselves in disagreement about how best to follow up digitally generated prospects, in order to maximise revenue generation.
Organisations often invest substantial amounts of time, effort and money into optimising their digital journey. Whether it’s through email campaigns, social media strategy, paid advertising or even SEO, the purpose of these digital channels is to capture hand-raisers that will later transform into MQLs, which they can pass to the sales team.
It would be easy to assume that with this methodology, the baton from marketing to sales would be passed with speed and efficiency. But at GCL, time and time again our experience has taught us that this isn’t the case.
For marketing, the primary objective of these types of campaigns is MQL generation by the creation and nurture of “hand-raisers”. These are typically measured by lead scoring criteria until the point at which they can be considered an MQL and passed to the sales channel for follow up and engagement.
However, often sales don’t share the same positivity about this approach. Their job is to generate revenue and if they’re given a high volume of marketing leads (or just plain hand raisers) that aren’t properly qualified or sales ready, they’re going to be quick to neglect them in favour of more imminent opportunities.
Can’t see the wood for the trees?
Then there’s the volume. If the volume of leads is high, sales often don’t have the bandwidth to effectively cover them all in a timely manner. In this case, leads may get lost, or by the time they are actioned, the opportunities have become obsolete. Additionally, there are situations where MQLs are passed to someone who is more customer service focused and there is no thorough sales aligned qualification process.
The point we're making here is that there's an engagement gap. You can have all the leads in the world but if they’re not converting into sales opportunities then you are wasting valuable time and resources, and also running the risk of losing key stakeholder buy-in.
A Case In Point
We’re working with a long-standing client who has embedded us in into their marketing and sales process. Prior to this, between April 2023 and April 2024, they generated 2,800 MQLs via digital channels in 12 different languages.
Over a 12 month period, the only human touch point from their internal team of SDRs was via emails, which were not actively followed up due to time constraints. Across 35 countries and 21 digital nurture processes, these MQLs did not receive any calls or direct human to human contact during the follow up sales engagement.
Due to the high volume of digitally generated enquiries and lack of effective follow up, the organisation was not able to demonstrate a measurable ROI on its digital marketing investment. GCL was then engaged to incorporate a consistent, professional and effective human engagement process into the mix, and within a three month period:
- Almost 80% of these MQLs were engaged in conversation
- 25% of which were converted into meetings and sales accepted prospects
- A further 50% were qualified and driven into high and low touch nurture processes
- The final 25% being qualified as inappropriate or outside the defined ICP
This gave clarity to the actual value of each MQL, a clear and appropriate future action plan for each non-sales ready prospect, and cleared out the deadwood to remove vanity numbers from the funnel. In addition, this enabled the client to assess the value of each digital channel and proposition, allowing them to cut funding to non-performing activities and increase budget to those demonstrating a strong ROI.
Bridging The Gap
Since the dawn of digital marketing, we’ve been helping organisations maximise return on their marketing investments by acting as a bridge between marketing and sales activities.
By qualifying your digital hand-raisers with accuracy and speed, you ensure that sales opportunities are passed on as soon as they’re identified. This allows accurate gauging of which category each MQL should be placed into.
Typically, with an exercise like this, these are the 4 categories that leads fall into:
- Qualified Out. These have no value because they do not fit your target profile / ICP
- Low Touch Nurture. There is a future opportunity here, but the opportunity is much further down the line and not clearly defined. The lead needs to be placed into a low touch nurture process.
- High Touch Nurture. There is an identifiable opportunity / requirement in the mid-term but not yet ready for direct sales engagement. The lead needs to be placed into a high touch nurture process.
- Sales Ready. Requirement identified that requires sales engagement, ideally passed directly to sales in the form of a booked meeting.
It’s Time To Build Bridges
By incorporating a direct lead qualification touch point as a strategic part of the sales and marketing mix, organisations automatically bridge the engagement gap that has been the cause of both the marketing and sales teams’ frustrations.
No longer will the marketing team become frustrated because they feel their efforts are not being utilised properly through lack of engagement from sales, and the sales team won’t be chasing suspects that aren’t sales ready – that gap will have been closed. With the gap filled, the funnel can become more streamlined and efficient, supporting harmonious marketing and sales alignment.
If you have any questions or would like some more information on how we can support your lead qualification in multiple languages, please feel free to contact us via our website https://gclb2b.com/contact-us/ or alternatively contact us on 0121 452 2020.
