Thank you, Martin, for going back in time with The Sales Evangelist podcast. Thanks to him, we're going back to episode 1177 where I deep-dived into why leads are creating more work for us.

In this episode, I share why many small organizations struggle with their inbound sales and how to fix it. The challenge is always deciding who should follow up on them and how to do it effectively.

The Sales Team

• Assume that a sales team is composed of three people: the marketing person who does almost everything, the junior assistant who helps with content creation, and the outsourced person who does the marketing strategies. Among the three, who should follow-up the lead? 
• Not all leads are created equal. This means that before deciding who will follow up the lead, the lead should be evaluated first.
• You don’t want your salesperson pitching to a lead that in the end would go to another competitor.

Do a Pre-Qualification

• Do a pre-qualification in your organization to know if the people you are going to have the conversation with are ready to consider the deal. Set a benchmark and rules for what you consider a marketing quantifiable lead. Consider the following questions: 
• What is considered a sales qualified lead?
• What is the KPI of your organization? 
• How many new inbound leads do you want to get per quarter/per month?
• How much money do you want to generate from those leads?
• The answers to those questions will lead you to your ideal customer. It would also help you identify the triggers that qualify them to be a marketing quantifiable lead and a sales qualified lead. 
• The work is far more efficient because when a lead comes in, your salespeople can vet them and follow the pre-qualification factors you’ve set to see if the lead can generate new business for the organization. This is also helpful in maintaining your current customers. 

Create a System

• Create a system to efficiently manage the workload. The marketing team can do the pre-qualification to increase the odds of the lead being converted into something real. Whenever a lead comes in, let marketing take a look at it and check the website and the title of the person. 
• Then let the intern or junior marketing rep take over the other tasks like looking into LinkedIn, HubSpot, Marketo, or other platforms you have to find the data that you can transfer into your CRM. 
• Marketing can help fix the problem of having to go back to the beginning of the funnel and pre-qualify the leads again because they’re not yet ready at the moment. 

Website Leads Matter

• The sales team sometimes takes for granted the leads that they didn’t hunt for. A good example is leads coming in from the websites. 
• It is disheartening when a sales rep doesn’t take that into consideration when a lead comes in via the website. 
• Whenever an inbound lead comes in, it is best to use your flow process to follow-up particular prospects. It should be written and put in your company’s playbook so that everyone can read it and use it with every inbound lead that comes in.

Follow-up Right Away 

• A stat from insidesales.com said that a lead that’s contacted within five minutes is 100 times more likely to convert than leads that are followed-up 90 minutes later.
• When a lead comes in, follow up right away. You’re more likely to convert than if you wait. 
• The sales team can take a quick visit to the person’s website, check their LinkedIn profile, and the pages they’ve visited on your site. 

Focus On The People That Matter

• Include in your flow process the phone call and email for the first time then do the same things a day later. Connect with them on LinkedIn and share some of their content for seven full business days. 
• With the right system and by focusing on the people that matter, your work is going to be minimized but the return is going to be much higher. 
• Filter your inbound leads and let the marketing do the review. Recognize the good ones and toss them over to the sales reps to reach out and convert.

"Evaluate the effectiveness of each lead, because not all leads are created equally." - Donald Kelly. 

Resources

Connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a message for more help with cold outreach, or send me an email: [email protected]

If you need more help elevating your sales game, join my Sales Mastermind Class.

Sponsorship Offers

1. This episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot.

With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales.

1. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.

Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at linkedin.com/tse.

1. This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation.

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Credits

As one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey. We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify. Audio provided by Free SFX, Soundstripe, and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and Produced by Brightseed and Hill.