4. Identifying and Qualifying Sales Leads
Demand generation is a crucial objective for most marketing teams. For B2B marketers in organizations with professional sales forces, that translates into generating sales leads.
Sales leads are identified people in buying centers with two characteristics: they have a challenge that we are well-positioned to address with our products and services, and they are willing to engage with our salespeople about that challenge, leading to a sale for our organization.
Generating and qualifying sales leads involves five broad steps:
- Defining the characteristics of an ideal sales lead.
- Defining the mix of lead generation methods the organization will use to identify leads.
- Using the defined mix to generate potential leads
- Defining and managing a process to qualify leads to be passed to the sales team for followup
- Defining and managing a process to take back and nurture leads that turn out to be sales-ready
The resources in this chapter will pick up on the other two objectives from the last chapter.
ideal sales lead; a person in a buying organization with a strong chance of becoming a customer soon.
lead: personally-identifiable information about individuals and their buying decision context.
and share leads between the marketing and sales teams. This process enables us to be helpful to customers while making the best use of our marketing and sales resources.
Learning Objectives
| By the end of this chapter you should be able to… | (covered in these activities) |
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| A. Explain the roles and handoffs of the three teams interacting with customers on their buying journeys, and why alignment between them is critical. | 3.1 | ||||||
| B. Define key objectives and fundamental elements of an education-focused “inbound” approach to B2B marketing. | 3.1 | 3.2 | |||||
| C. Define key technical tools used to accomplish activities and maintain alignment across all three teams. | 3.2 | ||||||
| D. Categorize elements of potential B2B customer value in order to effectively draw on them when crafting B2B marketing content and messaging. | 3.3 | 3.4 | |||||
| E. Align the use of value proposition statements and positioning statements with the phases of the buying process. | 3.4 | ||||||
| F. Design effective business value proposition statements from two broad frames of reference. | 3.5 | 3.6 | |||||
Independent Learning Activities
- 3.1 Video Lecture: “Aligning B2B Marketing for Value”
- 3.2 Video: Hubspot (2022) “Inbound Marketing Fundamentals”
- 3.3 Reading: Bain (2018) “The B2B Elements of Value”
- 3.4 Video Lecture: “Aligning Sources of Value with Buying Stages”
- 3.5 Reading: Konrath (2012) Value Propositions (Excerpts)
- 3.6 Video Lecture “Building Value Proposition Statements”