Prospect profiling is an essential part of converting leads to sales – it identifies people who have a need for your product, and gathers data about them that’ll help form the marketing messages and sales pitches necessary to convert them into customers.As important a step as prospect profiling is in lead generation, it should not be the domain of your sales team. Things were different 20 or more years ago, when marketing and sales departments worked in isolation. Today, marketing departments are responsible for a lot more of the sales funnel than before, working hard to generate and nurture leads until they’re at the bottom of the funnel and ready to buy. This is when your sales team move in and start closing deals. In this blog, I’m going to discuss the reasons why your sales team shouldn’t get involved in prospect profiling.
Profiling hampers the productivity of your sales team – productivity they need to make sales
Productivity is a vital ingredient in increasing sales efficiency. The more sales made by each member of your team, the lower the cost per lead too. If your sales team spend half their working day on tasks like prospect profiling, their potential to make sales is significantly lowered. And it’s not just about the hours lost – the greater the variety of tasks on your team’s plate, the less effectively they’ll be able to focus on their core role. Besides, once the sales pipeline gets filled and their attention moves to closing deals, they won’t have time to do the profiling that’ll keep the pipeline full.
Getting your sales team to perform tasks they don’t enjoy or excel at is bad for morale
Your sales team chose their current careers because they wanted to sell – not conduct research. Even though they might be perfectly capable of carrying out the painstaking research required in prospect profiling, it’s not what they’re best at (and if they are, they’re in the wrong department) or trained for. What’s more, if you get your team to carry out tasks they outright don’t enjoy, there’s a high chance team morale will suffer, which will get in the way of their drive to sell.
Getting a salesperson to prospect could damage their sales performance
Salespeople are motivated by targets and commissions, and those come through selling, not through prospecting. If you want your team to become better at selling, they need to spend time focusing on their core strengths, rather than expending time and energy getting to grips with the new skill set required for prospect profiling. If members of your team aren’t strong at prospecting, but are fantastic sales people, their sales performance might not reflect their innate ability to sell. And because the two duties are not measured with different metrics, it’s much harder to identify the root cause of this decreased sales performance.
Outsourcing prospect profiling reduces cost per lead and lets your sales team get on with selling
One of the most compelling reasons not to let your sales team do their own prospecting is that it’s often cheaper to outsource lead generation services to a company that specialises in it, increasing the ROI. They’ll be skilled in prospect profiling, will have access to all kinds of data, networks and resources that you don’t have access to, and enjoy the economies of scale that come with prospect profiling en masse. Your sales team can then get on with what they were made to do – close deals.
If you’d like to learn more about how to convert a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL) and raise your conversion rates, download our guide:
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