Your sales hand-off will make or break your marketing (aka…why you might need to ditch lead scoring in favor of the window of opportunity)
(Rather listen than read? Hear me talk about this on episode 236 of the Hard Corps Marketing Show)
In the broadest sense, marketing’s job is to grow the audience, grow new business, and grow customer engagement.
As far as sales is concerned, though, marketing’s job is to grow the volume, velocity, and value of the pipeline.
When marketing hands leads off to sales too early or too late, it looks (to sales) like all three of those things are broken. Not enough volume of qualified leads, slow velocity from lead to closed/won deal, and even the value of closed deals might be too low.
Get the marketing -> sales hand-off right, and everything changes. Deals close faster. Sales even has to hire more people to keep up with all the high-value leads showing up on their dashboards or meetings on their calendars. (Then, of course, you need your handoff from sales to customer success to go well. But let’s tackle one thing at a time.)
Most marketing teams are clear on why and how to avoid passing leads over to sales too early. Especially in b2b, you do not want to become known as the salesy brand that calls every person the minute they register for a webinar, and keeps on calling every person fifty times a day until they relent and take a meeting.
But, the legacy of the early years of inbound marketing (yes, I’ve been around a while) has left some of us with a different problem: passing leads off to sales too late.
Don’t pass leads off to sales too late. (Is it time to ditch lead scoring?)
The marketing-> sales handoff has to happen within the window of opportunity. You have to connect with people before you lose them, or they lose their sense of urgency.
People are busy. They’re looking for answers and for solutions. In b2b especially, people will happily consume your content all day. But they’ll buy from you if you reach out with the right offer at the right time. And if you don’t, they’ll buy from the person who does.
Lead scoring can, counterintuitively, make us miss the window of opportunity. We used to wait for people to do all the things, rack up all the points, until they’re ready to get attention from a person. But while those points go up, your sales-ready leads are turning into tire-kickers. It’s not the other way around. Consuming 52 pieces of content does not make someone more sales-ready than the person who consumed two. Being the right person, at the right account, with the right interests, at the right time, makes someone sales-ready.
Reach out when they need you. Not when they hit 100 points.
Rather than building your marketing and sales systems around lead scoring, build around lead readiness. Even if that means someone manually triages those leads. Or you rely on lists or workflows instead of lead scores. Don’t miss the window of opportunity.
This is even more important in a super-niche lean startup like mine. We can’t automate demographic or qualitative lead scoring for a whole host of reasons. So the points game would largely be based on content engagement alone. That doesn’t work. You have to triage leads in real time.
Define sales readiness with details, definition, and discipline.
This isn’t easy. And it requires marketing to take the lead.
Just like your customers can’t actually tell you why they buy or even why they churn, your sales team most likely can’t tell you what a sales-ready lead looks like.
You should ask your sales team. It might be a super productive conversation. Or, they’ll tell you something like...’a sales-ready lead is ready to buy from us.’ Translation: ‘they’re waving money in my face.’ Maybe an exaggeration, but not a gross one. The conversation often goes something like this:
Marketing: “Help me help you. Let’s get to the bottom of this. Let’s decide which leads are most qualified. Then I can do more of what’s working to bring more of them to you; and less of what isn’t.”
Sales: “These just aren’t the right leads. We need leads that are ready to buy. Too many of our leads just don’t answer my emails or never schedule a call with me or ghost me after the first call.”
Marketing: “Yeah. Sales is hard. Ok, let me figure out what we can do here.” (Makes 5,000 changes to the lead scoring, lifecycle workflows, lead nurtures...prepares to have the same conversation next month.)
You have to start the conversation so you can work together to define, in clearly detailed terms, what sales-ready means for your sales and marketing teams. Do this in whatever terms make most sense to your business -- psychographics, demographics, whatever it is. Basically, you ask the same questions you’d ask while defining good-fit customers in the first place. But you’re getting more situational about: when is a person worth the time and energy it’s going to take my sales team to build a one-to-one relationship.
The definition should be built on your good-fit customer profiles. If you don’t have a solid brand platform, complete with good- and poor-fit customer profiles, go back to square one. You all have to be reading off of the same script.
Follow your definition with discipline. Turn it into a checklist. Not some lengthy narrative. Something simple and utilitarian. It’s written down, leaving no room for interpretation, assumption, or misunderstanding. Put it in your Sales and Marketing Playbook (yes, Sales and Marketing Playbook).
Your sales team follows it, to the letter, until you all decide to change it. (And define why and how you’re changing it. In writing.) Every lead is triaged following it. Systems are built to support it. No MQL turns into an SQL if it doesn’t exactly match what you’ve all agreed to. Your marketing team builds campaigns and nurtures around it. Segmentations and personalizations, messaging and metrics, are all built around that checklist.
Enable sales to connect and convert those sales-ready leads.
One of the most common mistakes marketing teams make is to assume their job is done once the hand-off happens. Today, marketing’s work is never done. Marketing doesn’t exist in a box at the top of the funnel. Call it lifecycle marketing if you want to. But marketing has a responsibility to ensure excellence at every stage.
You’re doing so much great work. Sales can’t possibly keep up with all the great things you’ve made. You can’t assume they know which link to send to which lead, when. You have to tell them. Send this person this blog post, that person this webinar, invite this person to have a call with this expert about this. Maybe even draft a few blurbs for them. To make it even easier. (HubSpot Snippets can help here.)
You can’t assume the same voice and values will carry through every interaction. Unless you provide some guidance to your teams. What do we know these people we’re talking to value? What’s the wedge that’ll get the conversation started? What should be the timing and tactics to help turn those 1:1 outreach activities into meetings and deals? Marketing should lead that conversation because marketing led the lead into the conversation.
Build a partnership and put that magical marketing people prowess to work to help sales take a marketing-centric approach to sales.
Nurture the rest until they are qualified.
You might have to open the window of opportunity for some of your leads. Or keep them engaged until it opens. Or engage with them a bit more to figure out if they are or ever will be qualified. That’s where automated lead nurtures come into play.
There’s no one right way to do this. Timing, tactics, and topics will vary by audience and industry. Your nurture tracks might be role-based. They might be built around a jobs to be done methodology. You might focus on dripping out useful content, linking to something a bit higher value or higher investment with each message. Or you might keep it conversational, asking a simple question that the recipient can easily answer.
Like any campaign, the key is to come up with some hypotheses, test, and track results. And, report on what you’re doing and the results you’re getting. Your sales team will trust that marketing -> sales handoff even more when they understand how you’re warming up those leads for them.
One more thing about why this matters: Your resources are set by your results.
A broken marketing -> sales handoff is broken exacerbates the ever-present tension present between marketing and sales. And it can put your entire marketing operation at risk.
The company’s resources go where the company’s growth comes from. If it seems that sales is delivering but marketing is not, the resources will go to the sales operation. If your marketing operation becomes starved for resources, it’ll become even harder to deliver that pipeline.
Why? Marketing relies on momentum. You don’t suddenly start delivering qualified leads overnight. Whether through organic search, email engagement, or stoking the flames early with ads, marketing gets results by building momentum over time. You steadily produce timely, relevant, useful content; build an audience; connect with that audience and convert them to customers.
If marketing is starved for resources long enough, it simply won’t be able to deliver. The perception that marketing isn’t delivering becomes reality. You go from seeming to not bring in enough qualified leads to actually not bringing in enough. It doesn’t matter that this is because you don’t have the resources to do the things that build momentum over time. What matters is the bottom line.
That’s when, most likely, fresh marketing talent will be brought in to fix what’s broken. New investments will be made. And you can bet that, if they’re successful, that new marketing lead will get the marketing-> sales handoff right.