When you’re into business, time is most crucial for you. You cannot waste it doing something unnecessary which doesn’t require much of your time and then end up not giving time and attention to matters that actually need them. This can be applied to the context of sending your leads to your sales team.

According to research conducted by MarketingSherpa, 61% of B2B Marketers directly send all their leads to the sales team without them qualifying. This makes the sales team lose a lot of crucial time in chasing leads that won’t bear any fruits. To make your business more efficient, you need to generate Sales-Ready-Leads.

So now, what is Sales-Ready-Leads?

What are Sales-Ready-Leads?

Breaking down the word, a Sales-Ready-Lead is a lead – such as an individual. a contact, or a company, that is “ready” for your company’s “sales” to them. They are potential leads that have expressed their interest in your products and/or services by, maybe filling out a form on your website, subscribing to your email list, or having contacted your sales team.

“A sales-ready lead is a lead that is pre-qualified and scored by the marketing team for sales using qualifying criteria. These criteria are pre-decided and agreed on by both marketing and sales teams.” – (Source – amarketforce.com)

How does this help you in generating more leads?

Sales-Ready-Leads helps you to attract potential customers who are actually interested in doing business with you, thus saving you a lot of time and resources by crossing out the ones who won’t give you any result. These enable you to close deals faster because the leads are already interested in what you’re selling. You’ll also boost your sales and revenue because you’ll be converting more leads into customers.

Here’s the quantitative evidence of how Sales-Ready-Leads help you in generation of a greater amount of Leads-

“Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads” – (Source – amarketforce.com)

“Companies that nurture leads generate 50% more sales at 33% lower costs” – (Source – startupbonsai.com)

“Nurtured leads produce 20% more sales opportunities” – (Source – startupbonsai.com)

Is it worth your investment?

Before answering the question of whether or not you should invest in a Lead Generation Strategy, it will be better if we discuss what are all the benefits that this strategy has for you.

Benefits of Lead Generation –

1. When you have a well-structured lead generation strategy, your company will get brand awareness. It will also have a strong reputation in the market.

2. Lead Generation automatically increases your sales and the chances of it, which means you’ll have a competitive advantage.

3. The best thing about this strategy is that it is a cost-effective marketing strategy.

4. You get to collect important data regarding your prospects’ preferences which is helpful to give them a more personalized experience.

5. This strategy gives you a better Return On Investment (ROI)
6. Educating the prospect with emails, white papers, ads, etc.

Now that you have seen the benefits and understood how important it is that you invest in this strategy, let us see some steps that’ll help you to go on with the process in a better and more efficient way.

How to Generate Leads for Sales?

1. Start with Planning

Every business and every good strategy must have a well-established goal and a clear path leading to it. Planning should be the first step before you start your actions as this will help you to achieve your goals in a smooth way.

2. Identify your Target Audience

Here again, like every other strategy, you need to select your group of audience that you’ll be targeting according to your niche. This will be beneficial to make a sale to customers who actually want your products and/or services. Your marketing team should know its buyer persona well.

3. Promotional Plan

The next step would be to sketch a promotional plan. Use your marketing planning to identify the methods and channels that will be most effective for your business type. Ask yourself the questions – What social media platforms are important to engage my leads? Where are they most active? Are there any industry events to be aware of?

4. Study the Sales Funnel

You need to take this opportunity and explore the sales funnel at its maximum potential. Turn this resource into an automated selling machine and create a consistent content strategy. Make sure to make good use of all the research you already made about your target audience.

5. Automated Tools

Your marketing team can take full advantage of automated tools to make content generation easier. Meanwhile, you can free up more time to focus on creating high-quality content that engages with your audience more effectively. Automation, in this age, is definitely an investment. Through this, your business gains efficiency during content creation, reduces the chances of manual mistakes, and improves workflow and overall customer experience.

“80% of marketers think marketing automation generates more leads (and conversions)” – (Source – startupbonsai.com)

6. Add Interactive Content

Different types of interactive content on your website create a two-way conversation between you and your customer.

Examples of interactive content include animated infographics, white papers, contests, landing pages, assessments, quizzes, eBooks, and many more.

With these resources, visitors naturally interact instead of only passively reading. This also gives them a fun and engaging customer experience and a great reason to pay attention to your brand!

Final Thoughts

When it comes to sales and marketing, one of the most important things you can do is invest in quality leads. After all, without leads, you won’t have any customers or clients! And without customers, there will be no business.