You ask the head of marketing how the team is doing and get a giant thumbs up. 
“Our MQLs are up!”
“Website conversion rates are at an all-time high!”
“Email click rates have never been this good!”
But when you ask the head of sales the same question, you get the response that echoes across sales desks worldwide — the leads from marketing suck.
If you’re in this boat, you’re not alone. The issue of “leads from marketing suck” is a common situation in most organizations. In a HubSpot survey, only 9.1% of salespeople said leads they received from marketing were of very high quality.
Why do sales teams hate marketing-generated leads? And how can marketers help their sales peers fall in love with their leads?
Let’s dive into the answers to these questions. Then, I’ll give you my secret lead gen kung-fu to ensure your sales team loves their marketing leads.
Marketers Must Take Ownership
“I’ve hit the lead goal. If sales can’t close them, it’s their problem.”
How many times have you heard one of your marketers say something like this? When your teams are heavily siloed, it’s not hard to see how they get to this mindset — after all, if your marketing metrics look strong, they’ve done their part, right?
Not necessarily.
The job of a marketer is not to drive traffic or even leads. The job of the marketer is to create messaging and offers that lead to revenue. Marketing is not a 100-meter sprint — it’s a relay race. The marketing team runs the first leg and hands the baton to sales to sprint to the finish.
To make leads valuable beyond the vanity metric of watching your MQLs tick up, you need to segment and nurture them. Screen the leads to see if they meet the parameters of your ideal customer profile. If yes, nurture them to find out how close their intent is to a sale. Only then should you pass the leads to sales.
Lead Quality Control is a Bitter Pill that Works
Tighter quality control might reduce your overall MQLs. Still, it will ensure only the relevant leads go to sales, which is a win for your team and your organization.
This shift will require a mindset shift for your marketing team: instead of living and dying by the sheer number of MQLs, you need to create a collaborative culture between sales and marketing. Reinforce that “strong” marketing metrics that result in poor leads going to sales aren’t really strong at all.
When you foster this culture of collaboration and accountability, it will be easier for the marketing team to receive feedback from sales about lead quality without getting defensive.
Remember, the sales team is only holding marketing accountable so the entire organization can achieve the right results. It’s not sales vs marketing — it’s sales and marketing working together to get a great result. Nothing more, nothing less.
We’ve identified the problem and where we need to go. So, how you do you get there?
Fix #1: Focus On High ROI Marketing Activities First
What is more valuable to you:
- One more blog post for a few more views?
- One great review that prospective buyers strongly relate to?
Hopefully, you’ll choose the latter. After all, talking to customers and getting a solid testimonial can help your sales team close leads today. Current customers talking about their previous issues, the other solutions they tried, why they chose you, and the results you helped them achieve is marketing gold.
On the other hand, even the best blog content will take months to gain enough traction to impact your revenue.
Still, many marketers who say they want to prioritize customer reviews focus all their efforts on blog content and other “top of the funnel” (Awareness, Acquisition, and Activation) efforts.
The bottom half of the growth marketing funnel (Retention, Reputation, and Revenue) often gets ignored, even though it’s where you’ll find some of the highest ROI activities.
Most marketers know retaining a customer is easier than acquiring a new one. But knowing this and working with sales on retention and account expansion are two different things.
When you start focusing on retention, upselling, and expansion, your entire organization will feel it, from sales to customer success. These happier customers will increase your average account value and drive awareness through strong word of mouth, giving you one heck of a win/win.
Winning the Retention, Reputation, and Referral game also helps feed your Awareness, Acquisition, and Activation activities:
- Increasing customer retention means more dollars stay within your organization to help achieve revenue goals and fund lead gen initiatives.
- A fully functioning referral system lowers your customer acquisition cost (CAC) because these leads are already warm coming in the door.
- Case studies and reviews are powerful marketing assets for lead gen and nurture activities as they demonstrate how you’ve solved identical issues for other companies.
Remember that the bottom half of your marketing and sales funnel is just as important as the top half. After all, there’s no point pouring leads into a leaky funnel. Instead, you want to build a frictionless, powerful growth engine that brings in the right leads, nurtures them into customers, and then delights those customers to the point that they can’t help but rave about you.
So, build a strong foundation and start from the bottom up. You’ll find a better return on your investment.
Fix #2: Join Sales Calls to Better Understand Your Target Audience
You can’t market well what you don’t know how to sell.
Your sales team speaks directly to customers, understands their pain points, and knows the language they use to talk about those pains. Your marketing team needs this information to craft the perfect marketing messaging your target audience will identify with.
When marketers join sales calls or speak to existing customers, they get firsthand introductions to these pain points. Often, marketers realize that customers’ pain points and reservations are very different from those they address in their messaging.
Once you understand your ideal customers’ objections, anxieties, and pressing questions, you can create content and messaging to remove some of these reservations before the sales call. This effort removes a barrier for your sales team, resulting in more SQLs.
Fix #3: Create Collateral That Closes Deals
One-pagers, landing pages, PDFs, decks — sales collateral could be anything that helps increase the chance of closing a deal. Let me share an example from Lean Labs.
Our webinar page has a CTA form that allows visitors to talk to our team. Instead of a simple “get in touch” form, we created a drop-down segmentation based on the user’s challenge and need. This step helps the reader feel seen, gives them hope that they’ll receive real value from the interaction, and provides unique content to users based on their selection.
So, if they select I need help with crushing it on HubSpot, they’ll get a landing page with HubSpot-specific content (including a video) and a meeting scheduler.
Speaking directly to your audience’s needs and pain points through these steps dramatically increases the chances of them booking a call. Why? Because instead of trusting that a generic “expert” will be able to help them with their highly specific problem, they can see through our content and our form design that Lean Labs can solve their most pressing pain point.
Fix #4: Focus On Reviews and Create an Impact Loop
A lot of people think good marketing is expensive. You know what’s even more expensive? Bad marketing.
To get the best ROI on your marketing efforts, you need to create a marketing machine that pays for itself. When you create this machine, you need to think about two loops: the growth loop and the impact loop.
- Growth loop — Awareness
Acquisition
Activation
Revenue
Awareness: This is where most marketers start. - Impact loop — Results
Reviews
Retention
Referrals
Results: This is where great marketers start.
Most marketers start with their growth loop and then hope that traction feeds into their impact loop. However, the reality is that starting with your impact loop is going to be far more likely to set your marketing engine up for success.
Let me share a client story to show you what this looks like in real life.
Client Story: 4X Website Leads In A Single Quarter
We partnered with a health tech startup looking to grow their website leads. One way to grow website leads is to boost organic traffic, of course, but any organic play is going to take time. If you’re playing the SEO game alone, quadrupling conversions can take up to a year or longer.
But we did it in a single quarter. Here’s how.
We realized that the startup’s demos were converting lower than industry standards. A little more digging showed us why: our client was new enough to the market that the average person didn’t trust them enough yet to want to invest in checking out a demo. So, what did we do?
We prioritized the last part of the funnel: reputation.
We ran a 5-star reputation campaign to collect reviews. Once we had the reviews we needed, we showcased them at critical parts of the website and then made sure those same reviews were posted and shown on other third-party review platforms.
Remember that reputation plays are vital, and they’re one of the plays startups often neglect at best and ignore at worst. What others say about your business is ten times more important than what you say about yourself.
By providing customer validation at critical points in the buyer journey, we were able to 4X the website leads in a single quarter!
So, when you talk to customers, always look for opportunities to drive review/referral conversations and use them in marketing collateral throughout the buyer journey.
Fix #5: Launch Phantom Offers for Higher Quality Leads
You may be reading this post thinking, okay, my lead magnets and offers might be way off the mark, but how will I get the budget to create a new one that might not even work?
It’s an age-old issue: marketing teams invest way too much time and resources into creating lead magnets that fail to generate quality leads.
One way to improve your chances of success, remain nimble, and stay aligned with your audience without breaking the bank is to create phantom offers, i.e., gauge the audience interest in your lead magnet before you create them.
For example, if you want to create a “World Security Report” for Chief Security Officers, don’t do all the research and complete the report as Step One. Instead, tease the offer to your audience before you spend time making it. Put an offer on your site asking visitors to join the waitlist for this report. Then wait and see how that phantom offer converts.
This is precisely what we did for a report by Allied Universal that ended up generating 80 conversions before its release.
The best thing about a phantom offer is that it’s a win/win scenario:
- Best case: You get conversions even before you create your lead magnet.
- Worst case: You save resources by not creating a lead magnet no one wants.
Remember, You’re On The Same Team
We’ve talked a lot about the reasons your marketing leads might suck. However, remember that it’s not all on marketers, either. At the end of the day, marketing and sales professionals are on the same team. They are not in competition with each other. They are allies working together toward a common goal.
Smaller companies — or anyone under $10M in net new revenue — shouldn’t even separate sales and marketing into different departments. These teams need to be so in sync with one another that your best bet is to align them into a single growth team, one cohesive front with a single goal: profitable customer acquisition.
Interested in learning more about the growth marketing mindset? Check out the Lean Labs Growth Playbook that’s helped 25+ B2B SaaS marketing teams plan, budget, and accelerate growth.
[TAG15]The post Why The Sales Team Hates Your Leads (And How To Fix It) appeared first on DigitalMarketer.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can entrepreneurs motivate their employees to do well?
Motivation can come in any form. Motivation doesn't have to come from a specific place. All that matters is that it motivates them. Motivation is essential for any business, no matter how it comes in the form of a carrot or stick approach.
A motivated employee is more likely to be productive and happy. Give your team the tools they need to feel empowered.
It is important to make sure they feel valued. They should feel encouraged to grow and learn. You can let them share your ideas and not fear of punishment.
Employees thrive in a company culture that supports them. This is how you keep your best people happy, loyal, productive and satisfied.
You need to recognize the behaviors that make you successful in order to maintain a culture. You can offer bonuses for achieving goals, training opportunities, raises in pay, or other perks like health insurance.
It is important to communicate clearly and provide direction. Make sure everyone is clear about what they are expected to do and why.
Make sure that your policies and procedures have been written down. Ensure that someone is responsible for ensuring they are followed.
And most importantly, communicate frequently. Keep your employees informed about the current state of the organization. Let them know about the latest developments and plans.
Communication is essential, and taking care of your team will ensure that you remain ahead of the rest. They will take care of your needs.
It could cost you big time if you don't have a good relationship with your employees. Studies have shown that companies with high employee engagement score higher in productivity and profitability than those struggling to retain their top performers.
It's important to remember that not all employees are willing to work at an equal pace. Some prefer working alone while others love to collaborate. There are many ways to motivate individuals, and you can choose your own.
Some may be more inclined to accept recognition than others. Whatever works best for you and your company, it must be consistent with the company's objectives.
You, the leader, are ultimately responsible for setting the tone. Be open-minded. Listen to your teammates. Don't forget to listen.
What keeps entrepreneurs motivated?
Freedom to pursue my goals is my biggest motivator. We live in a world that limits how much we can earn, save money, invest and buy, as well as our ability to borrow, rent, drive or fly. However, these limits do not apply for us. We have the freedom to follow our dreams and make them a reality.
We must not allow these limitations to dictate our lives. We lose sight of the fact we are in control of our destiny if we do. We are captains of our own ships. We are the architects and creators of our lives.
I am motivated by the desire to create wealth beyond all my wildest fantasies. To build businesses that transcend life. To build businesses that will change the way people live for ever.
To create stronger businesses than any governments, more influential as any religion, and longer lasting than time.
That's why you're here. I am determined to help entrepreneurs grow businesses faster than anyone else. Because when you succeed everyone wins.
What are 6 essential questions that entrepreneurs must ask to be motivated?
Motivation is the key ingredient to any business. Without motivation, you will not get out the door each day. If you lack motivation, it will be difficult to complete your projects. Motivation is essential for reaching your goals. How do we find our inspiration?
You may wonder, "What motivates my mind?" It might surprise you to find out the answer. This question might be one you've asked yourself for years. You are missing one of the greatest rewards of life--the chance to discover your motivation.
Discovering why you are there is the best motivation. You will then realize what drives yourself. You will find your purpose clearer and more meaningful. What makes you care? It will be much easier to stay motivated once you understand this.
Looking within is the key to unlocking your motivation. These are some questions to ask yourself:
- What are my passions?
- What makes my heart beat quicker?
- What is it that lights me up?
- What gives me butterflies in the stomach?
- What makes you feel alive to me?
- What draws you back to your project time and again?
Once you have your answers, it will be possible to determine your true motivations.
Motivation will be your strength through difficult times. It will provide you with strength when you are most in need. It will make you work harder. It will motivate you to succeed.
And if that's you, you won't stop looking for your motivation.
Take some time to reflect on what motivates you. You might be surprised by what you discover.
What are the motivations of entrepreneurs?
There are three major types of motivation that entrepreneurs can use. Each type of motivation has its strengths and weaknesses.
The most common form of motivation is external, where an individual wants to make more money. This motivation usually stems from financial concerns.
Motivation is externally driven by personal ambition, desire, and interest. This type of motivation is very goal-oriented.
It is rare to find internal motivation. Internal motivation is rare. They don't necessarily seek wealth, but instead pursue other goals like self-development and fulfillment or service to others.
People who have internal motivation are often called "passionate" as they find fulfillment in their work.
Finally, intrinsic motivation is the least common kind of motivation. Intrinsic motivation refers only to people who are motivated by the satisfaction and enjoyment that comes from working towards a particular goal.
Internal motivation is much more motivating than external or intrinsic motivation.
It comes from the inside. It's based on the belief in certain talents and abilities. These talents and abilities enable them to achieve feats that no other person could ever do.
Feeling fulfilled and satisfied when you realize your talents and abilities is a sign of happiness. It makes us feel that we are doing valuable work.
In simple words, intrinsic motivation makes us feel happy. It is knowing we can do anything we put our mind to. This makes us happy.
This feeling of accomplishment keeps us going, even when it is difficult.
If you don't like what you do, why bother?
Click here for more information about motivational entrepreneurship.
What makes an entrepreneur succeed?
There are two types: those who make money and those that make time.
What makes them different is their approach to business. The difference between them is how they approach their business. Those who make more money are focused on making more money, while those who make more time are more focused on making more.
Those who make money are driven by the desire for financial freedom. Their goal, and their only goal, is to get rich and stay wealthy.
They are motivated by fear, greed, and a sense of entitlement. They do not care about the future because they know that once they achieve their goals, they will be well-equipped for life.
This type of person is commonly referred to by the term "hustler". They put the bottom line first and look for ways to increase revenues without sacrificing quality.
Others make it a full-time job. These entrepreneurs are driven and passionate. They are driven by passion to create something lasting and meaningful.
Their motivation is altruistic. They are motivated to do great work. They care about creating products and services that matter.
These people are known as dreamers. They are driven to achieve their goals through vision and inspiration. They know that success requires hard work, perseverance and dedication.
However, the most important quality of these entrepreneurs? They are creative. They are constantly seeking out opportunities that haven't been done before.
They thrive in the unknown. They love to research new areas of interest and will often spend hours on it. They love to learn new things and are open to new ideas.
This is why they are so adaptable to change. They will take on any challenge and get dirty. The only thing they won't tolerate is mediocrity.
So which type of entrepreneur are you? Is it a burning desire to make a living or a burning desire to find meaning?
If you answered yes to both questions, then congratulations! You are a successful entrepreneur.
Over the years I have had the opportunity to meet many successful entrepreneurs. What struck me most was their passion for what they do.
Success isn't measured by just monetary wealth. The impact defines them they leave behind.
Steve Jobs, for example, was well-known for his charitable efforts, but he wasn't wealthy. He didn’t even own his first home until he was in the mid-40s.
His ability to make products that made a difference in the world is what brought him wealth. And this is what defines him.
It's not your job to build wealth. It's not about building empires and amassing power.
Your job is building relationships with customers or partners. To build trust. To assist others in achieving their goals.
To make a difference. It's your legacy. This is not your bank account.
And if you're ready to start building a legacy that matters, let's talk.
Social Media University teaches you how passive income can be earned online. How to market your business and make it grow automatically.
What are the rewards of being an entrepreneur?
There are many benefits to being an entrepreneur. The first one is that you become self-reliant. You can stop relying upon others.
You can be independent and pursue your dreams. You can also build relationships with other entrepreneurs, as you share the same challenges and interests.
You gain confidence. Entrepreneurs are always learning new things. This gives you the ability adapt quickly and to be flexible. You won't be stuck in a rut if you think outside the box.
Our freedom to create our businesses is free from the restrictions imposed by society. We're free to decide what we want to do and how we want to live.
We can choose either to follow the crowds or go against them. We have the choice to be successful or unsuccessful. We can choose to fail or win.
The freedom you have is exhilarating. This freedom comes with a lot of responsibility. This is because you are accountable for everything happening within your company once you have taken on this role.
To succeed, you have to learn to manage risks. Do not be afraid to try out new things. If you are willing and able to learn from your failures, you will eventually reach your goals.
These are some of the lessons you should keep in mind when embarking on your journey.
Remember:
- Entrepreneurship is a lifestyle choice.
- When you run your own business, you're the boss.
- Avoid following the latest trends.
- The measure of success is not money, but freedom.
- Your personal and professional lives must be balanced.
- Set clear expectations.
- Always be open with your team.
- You must do something if you want to see something happen.
Statistics
- “If you look to lead, invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself – your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. (americanexpress.com)
- “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.” (oberlo.com)
- "Most of the time when people ask me about motivation, 80 percent of the time, I attribute it to gratitude. (entrepreneur.com)
- Invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you and 15% managing your peers.” (americanexpress.com)
- I shifted my motivational point from something huge (and undefined) to improve by just 1% each day. (carolroth.com)
External Links
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[TAG32]
[TAG35]
- This is Jeff Bezos’s inspirational quote he keeps on his fridge
- Richard Branson is a billionaire. Here are my top ten tips for success
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How To
Are You a TRUE Entrepreneur?
A true entrepreneur is a person who creates value for himself and those around him. He is risk-averse, he creates businesses, and he earns money.
He doesn’t wait for anyone to offer him a chance; he searches for them himself. He is self-motivated, a leader and a winner.
A true entrepreneur can quickly make and execute decisions. He sees the problem clearly and finds creative solutions.
In his mind, there is little difference between business and life. Entrepreneurship is not a job to him; it's a way for him to live.
True entrepreneurs are unafraid to fail. Failure is an essential part of being successful. True entrepreneurs embrace change and thrive under pressure.
They are driven to attain their goals and they never stop trying. They enjoy what they do, and that is why they are passionate about it.
They aren't only looking to build profitable companies but they also want to make their lives and those of their families successful.
This question will help you to decide if you should start your business.
"Am I a true entrepreneur?" If your answer is yes, you should take action. If you answered "No", then it might be time for you to rethink your career path.
