Increasing Lead Conversion – Getting Sales Leads and Your Sales Force To Do Business Together and Get in the Door of the CFO Office

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Getting leads to turn into sales is the ultimate goal of collaboration between sales and marketing, and if your job as a marketing executive is to structure your marketing initiatives to increase lead conversion, it’s imperative to understand its secret sauce. Marketers always try to implement processes for the fastest follow-up with prospects, and the technology to make that happen is getting better and better. But the complicated process of getting sales leads and making a sale happen – or, in too many cases, not happen because it gets lost or dropped — is a matter of organizational accuracy. Any missteps by your sales force work against your bottom line.

The Biggest Structural Challenge to Getting the Lead to Convert

Companies tend to fail to identify the key steps in the process and don’t properly engage, inform or equip their sales force.

• Frequently, leads are handed off to a quota-motivated sales person, instead of someone who would be dedicated to a single task of properly qualifying and nurturing the opportunity.
• Advanced marketing automation is not a substitute for someone to qualify the leads. It requires the right strategy, right qualification and scoring process, and most important: the source of leads or a lead generation partner that provides inflow of warmed-up prospects that are advanced in sales pipeline – SQL vs. NQL (Sales Ready Leads vs. Marketing Ready Leads).

Need Help Getting in the Door?

With Proformative, a leading B2B demand generation platform, you can leverage your existing digital assets and create direct connections with Proformative’s online community and membership base of 600,000 corporate finance, accounting, treasury and related professionals who directly control billions of annual spending. There are many ways to establish your brand and generate quality leads within the vast array of Proformative’s community members.
For many organizations that use thorough lead qualification processes, conversion is increased to up to 65%, whereas those without a proper qualification framework see conversions in the 10% range.
Proformative offers the most advanced thought leadership and demand generation platform for companies looking to reach CFOs, treasurers and other decision-makers with the right message at the right cost, with both know-how and the advanced automation systems as a proven methodology for nurturing highly qualified leads and making them sales-ready.

Keys To Handling Sales Leads

• Don’t FORCE your Sales Force

Your sales force exists to close business; it’s what they do. So let them do their jobs. It takes about 6-8 touches to getting a qualified sales lead. That is not something that you want a costly, quota-driven seller working on. You want them working on what they do best, closing business and multiplying your revenue.
Closers don’t have time to, nor do they want to, follow up on leads. They won’t, and it’s frustrating trying to get them to do it. When a sales rep is planning a day, he or she is looking for where to find new business today, not down the road.  The first thing that gets put off is follow-up on new, unqualified leads. When you consider qualified leads are 32 times more successful when contacted 1 hour after an interest event versus 24 hours, this is costly.

• Having a process and a dedicated resource for lead analysis

A sales qualification team can convert up to 6X as many opportunities if they work with highly qualified leads. You want someone whose sole job is to reach your leads, overcome objections, make sure they are a fit, and get them connected to sales forces.
With a strong lead qualification plan that includes an individual committed to the sole purpose of qualifying leads, your organization can achieve much return on investment in all your lead generation and lead nurturing initiatives.
Organizations need a resource between lead generation team and the sales force to follow up on leads from marketing and decide which ones should go to sales and which ones should be sent back to marketing for further nurturing. This can be either done in-house or outsourced. The important thing is that raw, unfiltered leads are not being sent directly to sales.

• Understanding prospects’ behavior with predictive analytics systems

Leading companies are increasingly turning to predictive analytics to score leads, understand and forecast behavior of their target demographics and its effect on transactions. Rather than relying on intuition when pricing products, maintaining inventory or hiring talent, managers are using data, analysis and systematic reasoning to improve efficiency, reduce risk, increase profits and increase lead conversion.
Predictive analytics systems serve marketing and sales teams as they work with “What happened?” to predict “What’s next?” and “What to do about it?”

Giving FORCE to the Qualification

• Understand your buyers
• Learn know where, when, and how to engage with them
• Map your customer’s buying process
• Have the right strategy and the right execution teams for lead generation and lead nurturing
• Sanitize your customer data and systems

The Proformative Community is where corporate finance decision-makers actively search for relevant products and services. Over 600,000 corporate finance, accounting, treasury and related professionals, who directly control billions of annual spending, research their product and service purchases using Proformative’s Marketplace.

Download our white paper “How To Market To Today’s CFOs” and let us connect your content with a captive audience of over 600,000 corporate finance executives, members of Proformative.com. 
Now that you’ve found a great partner to help you get in the CFO’s door and you’re better equipped to structure the sales process:

• What would you like to offer back into the community about how you’re keeping your sales conversion rate high?
• Any secrets for improving lead qualification?
• What’s been the best thing you’ve gained from joining the Proformative community?

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