Lead management is as important as generating a lead for any business. But as important as generating leads may sound, you’ll do better if you understand one of the most crucial steps in lead management: lead hand-off.
Lead hand-off simply refers to passing the lead from your marketing team to the sales team. At this level, there must a solid and cordial relationship between your marketing and sales teams to succeed throughout the process. If the two teams aren’t working in agreement, they’d be working against each other. So it’s very important to understand fully when it’s the best time to pass leads off from the marketing to the sales team.
Many companies, they fail woefully at this critical step and they tend to have poor conversion rate as a result of this failure.
Before you go headlong into passing off the leads, you should try to align your sales and marketing team on what is internally known as MQL vs. SQL. Ignoring this could lead to a poor conversion rate at the end of the day.
Start with the right steps of delivering the most appropriate leads to your sales team. And then you’ll be right on your path to success.
So let’s start off with what you need to know to succeed in handing off leads to sales teams.
You probably already know what a lead is but, in case you don’t I’m going to tell you now.
Sales Leads Definition
There are many definitions of the term on the internet but I find this one by Investopedia quite interesting and straight-to-the-point.
“A sales lead is a person or business who may eventually become a client. Sales lead also refers to the data that identifies an entity as a potential buyer of a product or service. Businesses gain access to sales leads through advertising, trade shows, direct mailings, third parties, and other marketing efforts. A sales lead is not really a sales “prospect” per se because a business would need to examine and qualify the potential new client further to determine their intent and interest.” – Definition by Investopedia
MQL and SQL Explained
When talking about leads, there is what is known as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and there is also what we call Sales Qualified Leads (SQL). As for the MQL, these are the types of leads with a very high tendency or likelihood of becoming customers. The SQL’s are those leads that have been qualified by the sales team as potential customers. By this, the MQL can be said to consist of those customers who are not yet in the buying cycle. But the SQL’s are close to being converted and so are regarded as potential buyers or customers.
Understanding these two types of leads is vital to your sales growth. And, it’ll help you figure out the right time to hand off your leads from the marketing to the sales team.
Trick For Identifying MQL
Sometimes it can be tricky to know exactly what a marketing qualified lead is. The truth is there is no one-size-fits-all criterion for determining what constitutes an MQL. Because it varies across companies. And most importantly, MQL should be designed in such a way that it suits your particular buyer personas and industries. Trying to target random customers will amount to a waste of time for your lead generation efforts.
So the trick is to start by creating your buyer personas, then leverage mql vs sql HubSpot sales reporting to get clear insights into which persona has the higher conversion rate, and then create valuable and relevant content targeted at your audience.
Why Lead Hand-Off Fail
I’ve heard people asked me many times what do I think is the reason why lead hand-off fails and I have always seen these reasons below as top reasons for many businesses’ failure at lead hand-off process.
So I’m going to share with you here what lead hand-off pitfalls to avoid so you succeed in the process.
They may be more than those ones below, but these are key reasons I believe many businesses fail in the lead hand-off process:
- Misalignment. I mentioned this in the earlier part of this article, and I emphasized why you shouldtry to have both your sales and marketing team aligned on what is internally known as MQL vs. SQL. The important thing about this alignment is that it helps eliminate confusion that could arise when determining when to hand off a lead.
- Inadequate Data. This arises when the sales team has huge leads but without adequate data to determine how valuable or not the lead is.
- Unjust distribution. Sometimes unfair compensation like where sales development person is rewarded based on the revenue streams can result in lead hand-off failure. This is so as the sales development reps usually tend to push more leads to sales people with promising and higher closing rates and lesser leads to those with lower closing rates.
Effective Leads Hand-Off Tips
- Be patient about handing off sales. Before taking that hasty decisions of handing off leads to sales reps make sure you vet them appropriately using effective lead scoring criteria.
- Avoid low-quality MQL’s. How to simply know these types of leads is that if such leads submit a free assessment or demo request on your they’ll hardly return to your website, or you simply wouldn’t hear from them.
- Not All Leads Qualify As MQL’s. Rather than qualifying every lead as MQL’s you should look for key marketing qualified lead actions to determine which lead qualify for MQL or not. Some of these actions include submitting an email address for a newsletter, filling out a lead generation form, downloading trial software; contact you for more information about your services, or products, spending a lot of time on your website or returning to it, among many others.
- Retain Customers Once Converted. As must have heard, the customer is hard to gain than to lose. So once you’re able to convert a new customer don’t relent but keep sending him/her back to marketing. The reason why you should send your customers back to marketing is that they need more nurturing. At this stage, you should create a plan to continue providing value to those customers so you can easily retain them.
Wrapping UP
I’m certain you’ve seen why understanding the right time to hand off leads from marketing to the sales team is very important. Of course, you can make sales without it but not as meaningful and stable as when you have a full understanding of it.
The good thing about this whole process is that it ensures your marketing and sales teams are aligned on what’s known internally as MQL vs. SQL.
By creating your buyer personas and create relevant content for your audience you’ll be speaking the language of your audience.
But getting this whole process up and running can be a bit challenging if you don’t have the expertise. And in that case, you might want to hire professional help. That way, you’ll be able to save potential customers and money that would have been lost to ineffective B2B marketing.
