While all leads are valuable, there is a distinct - and important - difference between those that are at earlier stages of the buyer's journey, and those that are deemed to be “sales ready”.
Contrary to what the term suggests, a sales ready lead is not a customer that is 100% ready to buy and just looking for the checkout button so they can submit a purchase order. Those wonderful kinds of customers aren’t really leads at all anymore: they’ve graduated to the next step, and what’s next is really more of an administrative or transactional function.
What is a Sales Ready Lead?
A sales ready lead is a customer who has been vetted through a demand generation system, and deemed to be in a state where the sales team can enter the picture and assume ownership of the relationship.
While the definition of a sales ready lead varies from industry to industry (and sometimes within industries), generally speaking they are classified as customers who:
- Fall within an organization's target market (i.e. is referenced as among its buyer personas).
- Can make, or can influence, a buying decision.
- Believes that the business can solve their problems/fill their needs and expresses this interest somehow.
- Either explicitly agrees to meet with a salesperson or would be likely to agree to a meeting (either in-person, over the phone, or over the web)
In light of the above criterion, the question that businesses – and especially sales teams – need to answer is:
How Do You Determine When a Lead is Sales Ready?
In our experience, the following 3 strategies are essential to this process:
1. Generating and Targeting Content
Many customers today will not explicitly reveal that they’re interested in doing business with a company. Rather, their intentions have to be gleaned indirectly and tacitly -- and the most cost-effective and reliable way to do this is by using inbound marketing to generate quality content and target customers to see what they find engaging and attractive.
Generally speaking, leads further along the customer journey (i.e. sales ready leads) will be more interested in content that focuses on more practical and specific issues, such as implementation or after-sales service. Leads closer to the beginning of the customer journey (i.e. as-yet-unqualified leads or marketing qualified leads) are usually more interested in big picture issues, since they’re still doing their preliminary research and, for all intents and purposes, “window shopping”.
2. Using Various Calls to Action
The actions that leads wish to take can also help distinguish whether they’re sales ready. As such, businesses should use tiered calls to action (CTAs), which enable customers to self-identify where they are in the customer journey. For example, a lead that clicks a button requesting a sales rep call is usually sales ready (though not always!), while a lead that clicks a button to download a general information Infographic is usually not sales ready.
3. Leverage Marketing Automation
Qualifying sales leads with human resources is frankly impossible, since customers who aren’t at this stage won’t even agree to a call (unless they’re chronic “look-i-loos” who just want to spend time on the phone talking with sales people!).
As such, businesses need to leverage marketing automation to nurture customers forward and gate them through strategically placed and developed contact forms. For a good part of the customer journey, today’s customers – both B2B and B2C – are much more willing to talk to a website than they’re willing to talk to a person.
The Bottom Line
Whether your business is an ambitious one-room start-up or an established multinational enterprise, the bottom line is the same: your sales team, no matter how small or large it may be, cannot afford to connect with a majority of leads that aren’t sales ready. It’s simply not feasible.
Using the strategies above as part of a comprehensive and expert-led inbound marketing program will help ensure that your sales team is happy and successful – which is the key to a thriving business, quarter after quarter and year after year! To learn more, download our free eBook to help turn your website into a lead generation machine.
Topics: Lead Generation
