Why Lead Qualifiers and Marketers Should be Best Friends

May 9, 2011

Some companies out there have lead qualifiers working under the VP of Marketing — in this case, your Sales and Marketing organization gets it — read no more. While this organizational structure can present challenges in other ways, there is likely a great deal of clarity between marketing and the “front of the funnel” sales.

For those organizations who have Lead Qualifiers (aka Business Development Specialists, Cold Callers, Inbound Lead Specialists, etc.) reporting to the VP of Sales — hear this: Your Lead Qualifiers need to be best buddies with the marketing team.

What can Lead Qualifiers offer that Marketers need?

  • Specific content requests coming directly from the mouths of prospects
  • Dialogue with prospects regarding trends in the market, key issues, etc.
  • Information about competitors that are coming up most often on calls
  • A better sense as to the persona of the prospect – interests, common personality traits, preferences, etc.
  • General feedback regarding what is confusing to them about the product and its value

What can Marketers offer that Lead Qualifiers need?

  • Content that resonates with prospects and gets a faster response time to emails and/or voicemails
  • Content that tells a story for your prospect so that they can truly envision how the product/service will benefit him/her
  • Content that answers most of the prospect’s questions so that the Lead Qualifier can qualify or disqualify prospects at an accelerated rate

It’s really quite simple. There is likely NO ONE within your organization who is having as many touch points with prospects as the Lead Qualifier. Marketers — think about it — it’s like having a built in research function.

Next step: A senior member of the marketing team should sit down with Lead Qualifier(s) at the end of each week and have a mini-retrospective (20 mins).

What should be discussed:What content got a great response? What didn’t? What specific request for content came in? How many email responses did the Lead Qualifier get? How many returned calls were there? What were the dynamics of the conversations that took place?

At the end of the meeting, create a prioritized backlog of content that needs to be created to support the needs of the lead qualification program and present to your sales and marketing management teams for approval.

Marketing and Lead Qualifiers: Communicate and help one another out — that’s what friends are for!