There are reasons marketing and sales go together. Both are built around business development. Both aim to grow revenue and both are known for stretching the truth in order to pique customer interest. However, what happens when marketing goes too far? It’s not uncommon for marketing to over-promise, or to use one too many prompts to illicit a buying response. What might this involve? Well, it could include an email or direct mail campaign promising immediate availability of product. It might involve placing information on the company’s website about performance, or about inventory levels that may or may not be accurate. After all, what’s wrong with stretching the truth just a bit? Surprisingly, these situations have a way of building upon themselves until all that’s left is an alienated customer base.
Is Your Marketing Producing Too Many Unqualified Leads?
Let’s assume that the marketing department’s definition of a qualified lead is rather vague. Using these aforementioned prompts allows the marketing department to spur customer interest. To the marketing department, customer interest in a given product is a good thing. Customers are interested, want more information and in order to get that information they call the company’s sales department. However, these potential customers expect product that’s ready to ship. They also expect certain features and benefits, ones that are outlined and promised by the company itself. Unfortunately, it’s these features that interest customers most and become the impetus they need to inquire about product availability.
For marketing, their job is done. In their mind they’ve provided a qualified lead. However, for sales it’s something else entirely. They are now faced with a customer who wants a specific product, one that marketing may have over-promised on performance and most importantly, one that should be available for immediate delivery. Unfortunately, it isn’t in stock and rarely is. The salesperson must either admit this or try and salvage the sale by pushing another product that most likely doesn’t meet the customer’s immediate needs. At the very least, the customer isn't getting what they called for.
Your marketing, sales and customer service must have one cohesive strategy: Your Customer Service Strategy Must Start with Marketing & Sales
After having read all of this, does it now make sense what the damage might be of producing unqualified leads? Does it provide insight into how an unqualified prospect leaves the sales team with little choice but to do what they can to retain the opportunity? At the end of the day, the customer is likely to be disappointed, if not extremely upset. At the very least, they’ll certainly feel that they were misled.
What the company fails to realize is that by pursuing this course of action, they have literally wasted their marketing expenditures by creating and pursuing poor prospects. If marketing is measured by its ability to increase ROI (return on investment), shorten the time it takes to make a sale, lower the company’s customer acquisition costs and incentivize customers to return, then this particular marketing department has failed miserably. It has cost the company money spent on specific marketing plans and has potentially cost the entire team an opportunity to close sales.
To learn about how to use the five low-cost marketing strategies outlined in the above video, and to properly determine your costs of leads and where they come from, please see: Calculate Customer Acquisition Costs From Three Marketing Campaigns
This scenario plays itself out all the time. Marketing doesn’t have a clear definition of what constitutes a qualified lead. They then decide to create their own by incentivizing customers to act. The idea is to increase customer interest and at the very least provide sales with some kind of opportunity. Get the customer on the phone, or interested in a face-to-face meeting. Once that takes place, the salesperson should be able to create an opportunity and start working on a long-term relationship. This is the perfect outcome to an imperfect approach. It’s risky and not at all conducive to ensuring success.
It’s best to avoid all of this and pursue a different course of action. Start by defining what a prospect truly means to your enterprise. Structure your marketing strategies around securing maintaining that prospect’s interest. However, be sure that what your company has to offer is well understood. More importantly, make sure that what you state within your marketing strategy is supported by the actions taken by your enterprise. This alone will save both time and money and ultimately ensure that your sales team has true, quantifiable prospects to close on.
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