How can you generate demand and get leads for different stages of the sales funnel to support your sales organization with leads that are really of value to them. Next chapter. Read part 4 below. (You can find parts 1-3 on our GF&Z website at 1) https://www.globalmarcomm.com/?p=2850 2) https://www.globalmarcomm.com/?p=2937 3) https://www.globalmarcomm.com/?p=2992 or on my LinkedIn profile site: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwflossmann/.)
This series of articles should help you to get an understanding about how to leverage the huge, mostly still untapped potential of valuable leads for your sales force. And how to do it the right way.
First of all, let´s talk about the marketing and sales funnel. There are many models of it around but, finally, they are more or less all the same.
We do not need to discuss the stages of the funnel here in detail and how they need to be worked. We will come back to that in the course of my upcoming articles.
What is important to understand is that the marketing terms and stages which are building awareness, opinion, consideration, preference, and purchase on the customer´s side need to correspond with and translate into the sales stages which are prospecting & qualifying, business needs assessment, solution development, selection, and purchasing in this case.
What the model should show is that marketing has or should have, respectively, the task to support the stages of the sales funnel and to generate and to work leads down the funnel as sales has to work them, too, but in a different way. Field sales people should not be burdened with working leads at the top of the funnel. They can use those in order to make their accounts more transparent and the leads should help them to get a better profile of their accounts and to see what´s going on in their accounts‘ departments. What they really need, however, is valuable leads that are qualified, that are further down the funnel, and that have a high chance of being converted to an order.
Having said all this, there are basically two dimensions when we are talking about leads for the funnel.
One is that you need to have many leads just filling the top of the funnel and that you have to nurture them and work them down with a variety of different tools. The other is that you should align a portion of your programs towards generating leads directly as far down in the funnel as possible.
The consequence is that leads are and should be different from one another concerning qualification, and that they should be strategically planned as such. It depends on what your strategy and plans are where the leads should be located in the sales funnel and how many you need. However, a goal that says that you want to generate leads only for the last two stages at the bottom of the funnel won´t work as you always need to have a much bigger quantity at the top that you can develop over time.
So, one key to success is that all demand- and lead-generation programs and campaigns must be integrated in order to work the funnel effectively. This means that in order to generate leads for the bottom of the sales funnel that are close to an order you will need to generate leads for the top of the funnel and for the middle of the funnel as well.
However, it´s not only about working the leads from the top down. Of course, and that´s the other challenge: you should generate as many leads as possible for the middle of the funnel and further down directly. In the course of my future articles, I will tell you why that all is, how it needs to be handled, and what is necessary to be successful.
Still interested? Stay tuned for more about leads and the sales and marketing funnels to come soon in part 5….
Josef W. Flossmann, EMEA Managing Director and Senior Consultant at Gilbert, Flossmann & Zhang Worldwide Marketing Consultancy
Contact GF&Z at solutions@globalmarcomm.comm (www.globalmarcomm.com ) or the author directly at jwflossmann@globalmarcomm.com in order to discuss.