Spends a significant amount of time feeding leads to sales

The health of your sales funnel doesnt just depend on your sales team. It should come as no surprise that marketing plays an equally large role in accelerating (or slowing down!) the speed of your pipeline. Since marketing spends a significant amount of time feeding leads to sales, theyre just as responsible (if not more responsible) for the quality of the leads and the programs that are moving them through the funnel.

So how can marketers ensure that theyre optimizing their speed through the pipeline? Why, with lead qualification and lead nurturing, of course. Lets take a look:

Qualify Your Leads...Twice
Rightfully so, marketing has started to focus less on generating a huge volume of leads and more on building a database of qualified leads. With lead scoring and grading, you can filter out bad leads before they ever make it into your funnel, increasing the value of your database and ensuring that sales is pursuing opportunities that are more likely to close. While a score measures interest in your company by giving values to certain prospect actions, a grade measures whether or not a prospect is a good fit for your product. This blended model makes it easy for marketing to pass along only the most qualified leads to the sales team.

Build Relationships with Lead Nurturing
According to recent research, buyers are more than two-thirds of the way through their research process before they even reach out to a sales rep. This can be problematic for companies who dont have a process in place to reach out to and nurture these leads through the buying process. Lead nurturing can help prevent these leads from slipping through the cracks by nurturing them to a sales-ready state over time all by dripping valuable marketing content to them based on their actions and interests. Now, you can be a resource for your entire database, not just for the leads who are ready to buy.

Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Forrester Research)

Having lead nurturing and lead qualification processes in place can help accelerate the sales funnel by providing qualified leads with the content they need to make informed buying decisions.

Want to learn more about lead qualification, lead nurturing, and marketing automation? Check out our free eBook, Mastering the Art of Marketing Automation, for more information.

ARTICLE SOURCE: This factual content has not been modified from the source. This content is syndicated news that can be used for your research, and we hope that it can help your productivity. This content is strictly for educational purposes and is not made for any kind of commercial purposes of this blog.