The Synaxis Keystone Marketing System provides a phased approach to the implementation, rollout, and operationalization of marketing measurement tools, web tools, and communications tools.
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Sales Lead Recycling: A Primer
Analyzing leads is a tricky practice. Sales teams have a tendency to gauge leads on their ability to close within a specified, usually short, period of time.
Prospects are perceived to be lumped into one of the following buckets:
- Ready to purchase (and will choose you or a competitor)
- Not qualified to purchase
- Qualified, but not ready or able to purchase
The first group is easy. You know fairly quickly where you stand. (Lost deals from this first group are not to be completely forgotten, but more on that later in this article.) The second one is easy too: they are not worth your time to pursue because they are not going to be able to be a viable customer no matter how interested they may seem. The last one is the most confusing of the group. In this case, the client is not ready to purchase, but clearly has a need and an ability to purchase your product or service eventually. In this case, these leads should not fall into the wasteland of lost deals, but rather they should be put into a lead nurturing program for recycling.
Engage Marketing
Your company should have an established lead nurturing program whereby qualified prospects can be kept familiar with your company. The goal is to keep you top-of-mind when the prospect is ready to make a purchase decision. This isn't just keeping your company's name and offerings in front of them on a regular basis (though that helps). Rather, the best practice is a process of gradually positioning your company as top-of-mind through providing helpful ideas and thought leadership. Engaging marketing automation tools increases your company's ability to do this by offerings a means to regularly communicate with these prospects via product campaigns, white paper, offerings, collateral mailings, or other media. Based on their response (or lack thereof) to these efforts, the marketing team would know when to pass them back off to the sales team for a more concerted sales effort.
Bottom Line
It is cheaper to place qualified, but unprepared, leads into a lead recycling program than it is to find and qualify new leads. If your product or service is filling a need in the marketplace, these unprepared prospects will eventually be prepared to purchase and, with minimal effort, you could be at the front of the line of providers vying for the business.
