Lead – a simple word, very powerful impact to YOUR business.

Does it mean the same thing to both your Sales and Marketing teams? As it turns out, the crux of most sales and marketing quarrels (read: logjams) are tied to this one unique issue – how do you define a lead?

Does it mean the same thing to your management team?

My suggestion is that it may be time for a brown bag lunch to find out what your company thinks and getting on the same page on that simple definition.

Here’s a list of things commonly tagged as leads and typically end up in your marketing database and/or CRM:

• tradeshow scans
• contact form downloads
• contact list buys
• sales rolodex contacts
• customer referrals
• cold calling contact discovery
• partner programs
• target company CEO
• webinar registrations
• partner’s customers
• inbound call
• event attendee lists
• advertising responders
• competitor’s customers
• target company with no contact attached
• contact with no company attached
• contact with personal email address
• whitepaper/eBook form downloads

Are some of these better than others?  Are some of these prospects?  Are they all?  It depends.

Depends on what you have defined as a lead and as a prospect?  Does one come before the other?  Are they the same thing?  It depends.  Depends on how you have defined your marketing and sales funnel (pipeline) and what it takes to convert from one stage of the pipe to the next.

The key to every solid B2B lead generation engine is the agreed upon definition of a lead, a prospect and a suspect.

If you’re reading this and you’re unsure if your sales team would define a lead the same way you would, STOP what you are doing right now.  Set up time for your marketing and sales team to get together and define each stage of the buying process and what a lead (or prospect or suspect) looks like at each stage along the way to becoming a customer.  Remember, this will more than likely cut down on the quantity of leads but the quality will make up for the difference.

Once these definitions have been defined for your company, decide as a team how contacts are going to be touched in each stage and by whom.

Interested in how others define leads and prospects?  Check these out…