Lead generation is part of marketing, and sales are responsible for closing leads, so it makes sense for these departments to be aligned when it comes to lead generation. Traditionally, lead generation has been the responsibility of the sales team. However, in the digital age, that responsibility is now shared between the sales and marketing team. This means that lead generation is the responsibility of BOTH marketing and sales.
However, why is collaboration between these two teams so difficult to achieve? From a lead generation standpoint, I bet that the most important thing for your company is ready-to-sell (SRL) leads. You can also do a lead generation analysis of your blog to find out which posts generate the most leads, and then make a point of regularly linking social media posts to them. As you can see, lead generators often rely on digital channels, hence their importance in the world of digital marketing. In other words, content creation offers a way to build thought leadership, which, in turn, makes your brand trustworthy.
Find out how lead generation fits your inbound marketing strategy and how you can start generating leads for your company. Even with the rise of content marketing and inbound marketing, it seems to me that marketers are stuck carrying the burden of prospecting for their potential customers. Email marketing can be “old school” when it comes to digital marketing, but it can also be a tremendously powerful lead generation tool. Lead generation, the marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service in order to develop a sales channel, allows companies to promote objectives until they are ready to buy.
Borrowing from the examples above, you could give a potential customer a higher score if they used one of your coupons, an action that would mean that this person is interested in your product. Establishing a closed-loop reporting system in the form of weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports allows your sales and marketing team to allocate the budget and collect data on leads more effectively. By optimizing your site for these local searches, you can boost your lead generation efforts and create a portfolio of qualified leads who are close to you. But, over time, you'll want to collect feedback from sales and update your criteria to optimize what reaches sales and what gets rejected.
A prospect's score can be based on the actions they've taken, the information they've provided, their level of commitment to your brand, or other criteria determined by your sales team. An example of a service-qualified lead is a customer who tells their customer service representative that they want to upgrade their product subscription; at this time, the customer service representative would raise the level of this customer to the appropriate sales team or representative.
