Developing a large list of qualified leads is essential and it goes without saying that the more leads you have the better chance you have of gaining sales. However, it is also important to note that more leads do not always guarantee a company is optimizing their efforts and doing so may be wasting valuable resources.

Yes, you have a lot of leads from your marketing team and a great sales force, but neither can be utilized to their full potential if the hand-off and interaction between the two is not up to par. This is where a strong connection between the marketing and sales teams must be made. Clarity and consistency is needed and implementing a standardized hand-off process can make all the difference. The hand-off to sales relies heavily on the quality of the prospect which makes it imperative that sales and marketing coordinate to define exactly what the ideal prospect is and the prime time for that prospect to be sold to. This entails continuous supervision of the nurturing process to identify when prospects are in the buyers stage as well as communication of seller expertise. Recognizing customer tendencies and requirements allows prospects to be handed off not only as highly qualified as possible but at the right time. As a result, the best leads can be filtered out to help shorten sales cycle, and improve customer relation.  Companies should always be alert of the changes that can be made in attempts to creating a perfect balance between the number of leads generated and the sales that come out of those leads.

Integrating a marketing automation system (Act-On, Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot) with a CRM system (Salesforce.com, InfusionSoft, Bullhorn, Base) allows companies to measure any sort of inefficiencies prevalent in the generation of leads and/or the sales process.  A great way to be aware of any issues within the hand-off is by measuring the leads to close ratio. This ratio can tell much about how well the hand-off process is and whether or not your sales and marketing teams are working efficiently on getting the best prospects to sales at the right time. A great salesperson still holds a maximum capacity of leads that they can handle. Flooding your sales team with too many leads can be wasting both marketing and sales resources. It’s important that a sales team is given enough leads that they are continuously working to close deals but selling requires time and energy. It’s important for companies to know the optimal amount of leads that their salespeople are able to attend to before their focus eventually is drowned into inefficiency. Calculating this number of leads can depend on many variables. It is a manager’s responsibility to obtain the information that makes it possible to evaluate the scenarios. For instance, the leads to close ratio as mentioned before can show whether or not a salesperson needs more or less leads to sell to.  Measuring the cost of sales to the leads given to a salesperson can reflect whether a salesperson is getting good leads or not enough.  These numbers should be analyzed to make the decisions of whether greater leads must be generated or a sales force should be expanded, downsized, etc. Often times the blame goes to lead quality whenever sales numbers are poor but a full analysis of sales and marketing as one can paint a much clearer picture to these problems.

Too many leads at once can be wasteful not just from the sales team standpoint, but also a marketing standpoint. So much goes into a good marketing campaign. When leads are being handed off to sales that cannot be properly followed up on, there is the risk of potential clients being lost as well as the time put into the campaign. So what can be done to make the connection better between marketing and sales? If the problem of too many leads available is concurrent, one solution to the problem can be to “throttle” your marketing campaigns if possible. This would mean that instead of launching an enormous e-mail campaign, splitting the campaign into smaller ones would allow leads to be produced in a more manageable quantity. Many times companies are way too eager to get sales as quickly as possible creating the issue of the transferring of leads to sales too early. Prospects are only good if they are properly qualified. This is an issue that can cause a low close rate and the improper use of resources that could have been used for more qualified leads. Fixing this problem requires much of the collaboration between sales and marketing that was previously mentioned and just as important, patience. Many assume that time and money are wasted by not selling as much as possible, but selling to bad prospects is even costlier.

There are many ways to better the hand-off process and to make the interaction between marketing and sales more efficient but it all starts in how you value, measure and track both departments. Optimum marketing and sales coordination is vital to successful revenue generation.