5 Tips for Generating Sales-Ready Leads
Ask 47 marketers and sales executives what “sales-ready leads” means and you’re likely to get 47 different answers. So allow us to throw our own into the mix.
Activate defines sales ready leads (SRLs) as people that have budget authority, are ready to spend in the right timeframe, and have specific needs that can be fulfilled by your products. Since we’ve had success at converting people matching that description, we feel confident about our definition.
Yet regardless of how you define them, everyone knows they need SRLs. Content syndication leads simply aren’t good enough. Why? Because SRLs improve pipeline. You can send an SRL to anyone with “sales” in their title and know that the lead is ready to be groomed for a deal. It’s not just common sense. It works.
For example, we have a large technology client that was getting 3% conversion on white papers and 8% on webinars, and challenged us to get to 15% conversion to pipeline. Not only did we reach it, we beat it, in some cases getting up to 20% conversion—and creating new opportunities in their pipeline. We did so by following our process for generating SRLs, the core of which we share with you in these five tips for achieving sales readiness with your leads:
1. Make your leads persona–powered.
Start by examining your key buyers and influencers. (If you need a hand, get help from persona experts to do so.) Apply the classic sales funnel to each buyer and influencer in the buyer’s journey. Map the pain points as the buyer moves from “I need to solve a problem,” to building a preference towards a particular solution, to finally making a decision.
2. Apply content tailored to each step in the buyer’s journey.
Once you’ve identified personas/key buyers and their pain points, you need to offer them content that speaks best to each persona given their buying stage. This means analyzing your best performing content, by persona segment, to determine what’s working and how to improve it, as well as mapping format and messaging to personas at each buying stage.
3. Collaborate.
When generating personas and creating content, you need collaboration with and feedback from stakeholders. Ideally, every party who is relevant should participate. That includes your sales managers, product marketers, even customers. You need buy—in on two items especially: accuracy of pain points and methodology you’re using to identify leads.
4. Layer leads with intent.
Acquiring leads is only the beginning. To ensure they become SRLs, you must apply ‘intent data,’ which are metrics such as actions taken (watched a specific video in the last two weeks, downloaded an asset in the past 30 days, etc.) that may indicate intent or future action making them an optimal fit for the SRL process they’re about to enter.
5. Apply the “secret sauce.”
After vetting your data for the basics (making sure it’s clean, testing phone numbers, etc.), we engage in a conversation with the audience member to extract qualitative confirmation that determines whether or not the lead is sales ready. We ask questions that reveal whether they meet relevant BANT (Budget, Needs, Timing, and Authority) qualifiers or have “compelling needs” that make them good SRLs. It’s the secret sauce that helps validate the process itself.
That said, you could do all this and still fail Activate’s test for sales readiness. So, here’s a sixth tip, much in the way Brian Epstein was the “Fifth Beatle.”
This process isn’t set-and-forget. You need human intervention and expertise checking the quality of your process with checkpoints along the way.
At Activate, we have a real, live human being, not a “machine” or application, vetting each lead to make sure they meet or exceed the markers we agreed to for sales readiness. Only then can you be confident that the leads you’re generating are heading towards sales ready.
