4 Thing Sales Teams can do to Help Optimize Lead Generation

Lead generation is generally considered to be the responsibility of a company’s marketing team, but that doesn’t mean that sales teams can’t help out. If sales gets involved in the lead generation process it actually makes it easier for many organizations to streamline and optimize their lead management strategies. Sales and marketing teams are trying to reach the same goals, so why can’t they just work together?  We’ve talked about this before when we’ve discussed the importance of sales and marketing alignment, and one of the key areas where sales and marketing teams can coordinate is lead generation.

1. Develop a universal lead definition. Having sales and marketing teams work together to develop an agreed upon definition of a quality lead can help to ensure that sales is getting the leads that they want and helps give marketing a better idea of where they should be focusing their demand generation efforts. If your organization doesn’t have a strong idea of what a quality lead looks like then it will be difficult to optimize your lead generation strategies to help you get them.
2. Keep communication lines open.  For any joint marketing and sales initiative it’s important that both teams are communicating with each other openly. Having regularly scheduled weekly meetings can help to minimize friction and ensure that everyone is on the same page and allows an open forum for feedback and discussion about current lead generation initiatives, the success that sales has had following up with current leads, sales thoughts on the lead generation process and helps marketing to see which types of leads were the most successful for sales.
3. Use social media. Using social networks for lead generation can definitely be a collaborative effort between sales and marketing. There are many different ways you can do this: sales reps can have their own social media accounts or you can organize separate sales accounts and profiles on social networks so that your sales team can collaborate on one account.  Regardless of how you choose to go about this, it’s important to make sure that you have a social media plan in place to help regulate social media usage. As long as you have that then you can have your sales teams about helping by generating their own quality leads. 
4. Help with content creation. One of the best ways that sales can help with lead generation is to take part in the content development process. By doing things like writing guest blog posts, giving feedback on current collateral and helping marketing by telling them about customers’ or leads’ opinions on content marketing can help to optimize their demand generation strategy since effective content plays a huge role in this.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at November 22, 2010 8:00 AM

Comments

lead generation

Bottom line – just get blogging! It’s amazing how many lucrative jobs I’ve gotten via my blogs. Plus my blogs have been a great way to show cases my writing just as much as clips, samples, etc.