B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #50 – Defining a Lead
Filed under B2B Lead Generation, Marketing and Sales Alignment, Marketing and Sales Funnel, Sales and Marketing Tips
Note the perspective in this blog bite assumes the following: Lead generation is about delivering high quality targeted opportunities to sales to accelerate revenue.
I have spent several years listening to people complain about the following:
Sales: Marketing does not know what they are doing, their leads are bad
Marketing: Sales is not smart enough to follow-up on our leads
The crux of the problem, in my view is the definition of a lead and metrics that are used to measure marketing success. My opinion, 2 things you should consider:
- Get WRITTEN buy-in from sales on definition of a lead
- Compensate marketing not on generating volume of leads but the number of leads that sales “accepts” – based on #1 (compensation tied to revenue is ALSO key)
So what is a lead?
I like Sirius Decisions framework. It’s a good place to start, then you can adapt for your business:
One Response to “B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #50 – Defining a Lead”
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December 14th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
As a marketing professional, I am constantly looking for leads. The other day I came across an emerging start-up called Salesconx (http://www.salesconx.com), which is a bit of a mashup between LinkedIn’s professional networking and eBay’s online marketplace model. It is free to join and very convenient. Definitely something to consider.