Sales Force Marketing - Salesforce.com CRM:
The Best Way to Qualify Leads: Have Them Do It Themselves

Good lead nurturing means always leaving your prospects wanting more.
Unfortunately, few marketers are doing lead nurturing at all. According to a recent ITSMA survey, just 42% of marketers said they were responsible for lead nurturing, and fewer than half had formal programs in place.

In part this is because marketers are under incredible pressure to generate new leads and keep the pipeline as full as possible. In this kind of environment, nurturing often takes a back seat.

But focusing only on lead generation reduces the efficiency of sales. The pipeline will be full of prospects who aren’t ready to be pursued or aren’t worth pursuing. This is one of the reasons that 60–80% of leads simply fall by the wayside.

However, if the prospects themselves had a say in determining their fate, they would not go gently into the black hole. Marketers need to create a lead-nurturing process in which prospects qualify themselves. After all, no one knows better how to match their needs to your solution than the prospects themselves. For marketers, it’s a way to save money, resources, and frustration.

Nurturing Is Necessary to Self-Qualification
But to do this, we need to nurture prospects more than we do today. Lead generation is the way to get your company’s foot in the door. Once that door opens, marketing needs to keep it open. Not by haranguing prospects, but by giving them enough interesting content so that they will want to leave the door open—even if it’s just a crack.

Think of the nurturing process as a kind of narrative journey. From the moment you first reach a prospect, gradually begin to fill in the story of your company and its specific advantages. Each contact needs to be interesting and informative, but it must leave a gap in knowledge so that leads are always tempted to want to learn a little bit more—like a good mystery. For example, rather than presenting Webinars or white papers as one-offs, create a series of related content that builds interest over time.

This parallel progression of increasing curiosity and deepening information about your company builds toward the ultimate goal of nurturing, which is qualification. Maintain prospects’ curiosity during the nurturing phase and they will eventually qualify themselves.
Remember that while we are trying to qualify prospects, they are also qualifying us. At each contact point, they are determining whether there is a fit between their need and our possible solution. This is why marketers shouldn’t try to put an arbitrary limit on the number of touches required to convert a prospect into a sales-ready lead. Prospects are the best judges of that, and they will signal their readiness through their increased interest in specific solutions for their business needs.

Get More Personal to Maintain Interest
The best way to generate this interest is by getting gradually more personal with the prospect. Value propositions should be tailored so that they speak to individuals. With each interaction, you need to convince them that you truly understand what their issues are and what role you can play in helping them—as individuals—contribute to addressing those issues. We tend to dismiss the role of the individual because B2B is always a committee decision. But committees are composed of individuals. To win the vote of the committee, we need to win over the individuals first.

Self-qualification eliminates the murkiness that surrounds the handoff process between marketing and sales. When prospects make it clear that they are ready to buy something, then—and only then—should marketing hand them off to sales. For B2B technology buyers, readiness to buy is the sum of four attributes:

• Budget. The company has budget approval to do a project of the size and scope necessary to include your products and/or services.

• Authority. The prospect has the authority to purchase or has secured authority through the necessary channels.

• Need. The prospect has expressed a clear business need for the kinds of products and services your company provides.

• Timeline. The prospect’s company has established a timeline for when it wants to implement the project.

When these requirements are met, sales assumes the primary role in the relationship. Marketing takes on a support role, providing information and sales tools that can help further qualify, propose, and close business.

Build a Closed-Loop Process
Inevitably, leads will fall out of the sales process—for example, projects are cancelled or business conditions may change. There needs to be a closed-loop process so that qualified leads do not disappear if sales can’t close the business. Marketing needs to catch those fallen leads and insert them back into the lead-nurturing process.

The best safety net is a computer system capable of tracking prospects across the organizational boundary between marketing and sales. That way, when qualified leads drop out of the sales process, they can automatically be routed back into the lead-nurturing process.
Remember that someone who has expressed interest in your company is a corporate asset and should be treated as such. Marketing needs to take on the burden of making sure that those assets are not lost or wasted.

If you’ve left them wanting more, that should be easy to do.

Source: Jeff Sands and Ajit Maira link

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