How to Shorten Your Sales Cycles Through Lead Generation?

Get engaged! Start with effective lead generation.

Sales: “Marketing doesn’t provide us with good qualitative leads. I don’t know what those guys are doing all the time.” Marketing: “We provide sales with lots of great leads, but they don’t deal with them in a proper way.”

Sales: “Marketing spent a large budget on a nice looking campaign, we got lots of leads, but unfortunately we lost 50% because we didn’t have enough sales people to ensure proper follow up.”

Marketing: “We made a great direct mail campaign, but sales doesn’t use it.” Does this sound familiar to you? Well then it’s time to engage marketing and sales within your company. Time to start proper lead generation, in a process oriented way.

Lots of marketing and sales teams struggle to get aligned on lead generation. The main reasons for this are: non-communication, “ivory tower” marketing and the absence of a proper lead generation process.

In order to have a proper lead generation process, sales and marketing need to be aligned. They need to act as one, they need to get engaged. How to do this?

The engagement model

The engagement model ensures the sales team of more qualified leads and shorter sales cycles. It’s a common marketing and sales process in which marketing develops awareness through a series of marketing tools.

These communicate the value proposition via offline and online touch points all kind and educate prospects about why they should buy from you instead of your competition.

To create a better lead generation process and increase qualified leads, marketing should manage marketing leads similar to sales forecasting.

They can do this by identifying them in a pipeline where they actively move leads from a passive, less qualified status to an engaged status based on their “degree of engagement”.

Ofcourse, every sales person knows that getting leads from an event, mailing campaign, banner click or whatever source, does not at all mean that they are qualified.

Leads must be nurtured through the marketing process until they are ready to being handed over to the sales team. There are two types of leads:

1. those who will buy within 3 months (the hinge point).
2. all the others.

Sales people, and marketers, will tell that sales cycles may take longer than three months. That’s true, and even longer, depending on the industry you’re in.

In our business (the consulting business) it often takes more than a year, even two years, but sales people do unfortunately not have six to twelve months to realise their annual objective.

They need to spend as much as time possible with prospects that are willing to buy in the short run. Marketing should be their partner in realising this objective, though the lead generation process.

Marketing needs to keep the insufficient engaged leads warm, make them hot and turn them into real qualitative leads, ready for the sales team and ready to buy.

The main role of marketing is to generate:

• interest and convince prospects of the added value, until they are within 3 months of buying, and then have the marketing team “pass” them to sales.
• trust that you will deliver.
• action to contact you, test the product, ask info, … etc.

The main role of sales is:

• to focus on the prospects that are ready to buy.
• to close the deal.

The weekly or monthly sales meeting gets a new objective

Prospects need to be re-qualified in each sales meeting. Their qualification status needs to be adjusted based on the willingness to buy.

So the qualification status becomes a moving element and must be managed until it becomes a real qualified lead that can be closed. Prospects that are not ready to buy yet, stay in the marketing playfield in order to further develop their desire to buy.

As soon as they are ready they enter the “sales play field”. If you use the engagement model, you will focus on short-term buying prospects, so the sales team won’t waste too much time chasing prospects that are not ready to buy yet.

Why should you consider the engagement model?

1. shorter sales cycles because you’re focussing on prospects in buying mode
2. better allocation of marketing and sales resources
3. a more effective marketing and sales organisation

If you want to start using the engagement model, to shorten your sales cycles, it is very important that marketing and sales is explicitly aligned about:

1. the definition of a qualified lead
2. the hinge point when a lead will be passed from marketing to sales (1 month, 2 months, 3 months, … depending on your business)
3. expected conversion rates once leads are handed over to the sales team