08 coreconcepts { qualified leads }

05.15.08
marketingnews

By Elisabeth A. Sullivan//Staff Writer

Take the (qualified) lead

A business card is not a hot prospect
When it comes to generating There are more words to use for a ria known as BANTS, which stands for
new business, marketers usually concern lead than Eskimos have words for snow, budget, authority, need, timeframe and
themselves with alerting potential says Doug Barth, CEO of SimplyDIRECT size, according to M.H. Mac McIntosh,
customers to their companies existence Inc., a Sudbury, Mass.-based lead gener- a North Kingstown, R.I.-based b-to-b
and generating enough interest to get ation and marketing database provider marketing consultant:
those would-be clients in the door. But with clients including MarkMonitor and
more and more, marketers are also held IBM. For some companies, a name with
Does the prospect have a budget?
accountable for bringing in the right a title attached is considered a lead, but
customers from whom the sales team a lead has to have some sort of quali- Does the lead have the authority to
can turn a profit, not just inquiries fication to it, he says. The lead really make a buying decision, or is he in
but qualified leads that have a genuine should mean that the person has reacted a position to influence the decision?
chance of panning out. to your pitch; they have reacted to your Is there a demonstrable need or
The definition of a lead varies from business proposition. an application for your product or
company to companyand quite often More than just an inquiry, or an service?
from department to departmentbut interested party who requests informa-
What is the leads proposed
at its most basic, a lead is a potential tion, a lead is a would-be customer who timeframe for making the purchase
customer who has expressed interest in is measured against a series of criteria and implementing your product
your product or service and who has established by your company. And those or service?
demonstrated a need that your company leads that fit the criteriaand are there-
What is the size of the opportu-
could help fill, says Brian Carroll, CEO fore deemed worthy for your sales team to
nity, and does it fit your offerings?
of InTouch Inc., a business-to-business pursueare called qualified leads.
(Carroll says the s stands for
lead generation and management firm But theres often a disconnect between sales-ready, which, of course, is
based in Arden Hills, Minn., and author the marketing and sales departments, equally important.)
of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. each of which may have its own defini-
I define a lead as what a sales person tion of a qualified lead. While marketers
would call an opportunity, he says. may define a lead theoreticallyexclu- Other criteria are often necessary, but
sively based on the companys BANTS is a good place to start, McIntosh
profile of an ideal customer, say, or says. Many companies also rely on a lead
worse, simply based on the leads scoring system in which lead qualification
expressed interest, whether or not criteria are each assigned a point value,
that lead is actually viablesales and leads that hit a predetermined mini-
reps often define a lead as a ready- mum number of points are passed on to
made opportunity to close a deal, the sales team as qualified leads.
Carroll says. Marketers should Marketers might be hesitant to take
consider the sales reps to be their ownership of the lead generation process,
customers, he says, giving them but it bodes well for them to do so, McIn-
what they need to succeed. tosh says. In the old days, the marketers
We as marketers are trying role was getting an inquiry and then pass-
to positively impact the pipeline, ing it on to sales as a lead, he says. Market-
Carroll says. The point is to free ers used to plant the seeds, initiating the
up time for sales people to spend lead generation process but leaving any
time with leads that will be prof- lead nurturing to the sales team. Today
itable, rather than feeding them a marketers role is to be in charge of the
raw leads or simple inquiries. Its entire orchard. Marketers must water,
a quality over quantity game, he weed and feed the leadsinitiating the
says. Better marketing leads mean lead generation process, weeding out the
more sales that can be directly good leads from the bad and then helping
attributed to marketing efforts those good leads to maturethereby free-
the trackable ROI that market- ing up the sales team to close the deal, he
ers need. Marketers and sales reps says. Sales people are the fruit pickers.
should establish an agreed-upon A fruit orchard analogy from a man
definition of a qualified lead, and named McIntosh. How apropos. But
qualified leads//cc

should meet regularly to ensure the analogy is a good one. Especially

that the criteria for qualified leads when budgets are tight and marketers
are still relevant and are flexible have to do more with less, or the same
enough to pertain to the compa- with less, they have to look at things
nys various lead-generating goals. that will move the sales needle, McIn-
To filter out the qualified tosh says. CEOs want concrete results
leads from those with less poten- from their marketing investments, and
tial, companies often loosely anything that we can show in ROI,
follow a framework of crite- theyll keep funding. m