How this one old problem degrades your pipeline

When we first meet, almost no sales director I talk to is thrilled with the quality of their sales pipeline. They may have a few superstar salespeople who are bringing home the bacon, but it’s rare that they have good visibility into when that will happen or where. Even rarer is the organization that can accurately measure KPIs related to pipeline quality across their organization.

There are many causes of this problem. Salespeople may not share a clear definition of what constitutes a qualified opportunity. Some may not enter deals into the CRM until they’re sure the deal will close (aka “sandbagging”), while others may enter any lead they find as soon as they find it. The widespread practice of inflating pipeline interferes with accuracy, as does the counter practice of deliberately keeping it thin.

All of these problems contribute to poor pipeline quality, but there is another contributor that is often overlooked. And it is as old as the industry: Lack of sales and marketing alignment.

We’ve been complaining for as long as any of us remember that marketing and sales need to be aligned, yet somehow we still haven’t mastered it. The age-old complaints remain: Sales says marketing leads are useless; Marketing says sales never follows up.

In addition to the many other disadvantages of poorly aligned departments, this erodes pipeline quality in multiple ways:

• Marketing dumps “leads” into the CRM that may or may not be ready for sales, and thus front-loads the pipeline
• Sales deletes those leads or follows up on them, based on their personal criteria, with no consistency to make sense of the quality of the leads within the pipeline
• Many leads may remain in the system to never be followed up on at all, making it difficult to untangle the quality of the front end of the pipeline
• Leads that made it into the pipeline pre maturely get marked as "closed lost" and are not properly recycled to nurturing, causing a lost opportunity in the future

While achieving full marketing and sales alignment is complex, the solution to this piece of the problem is actually fairly simple. What is needed is a shared definition of “qualified” and a system to ensure leads meet that criteria before being placed into the pipeline, regardless of whether they come from marketing or sales.

Why the CRM is both the right place and the wrong place to qualify leads

Most CRMs do a bad job of facilitating the “passing of the baton” from marketing to sales and, especially, back again when necessary. In some cases, marketing departments simply hand off spreadsheets filled with “leads” that salespeople are expected to input into the CRM. In other cases, salespeople may be expected to “harvest” leads from the marketing automation system.

To make matters worse, once the information is in the CRM, it generally contains very little actionable data to help salespeople know whether the lead is worth following up on, or even how to do so effectively. When they do follow up and determine that a lead is unqualified, that information is often “lost.” The contact is either deleted or ignored, and not passed back to the marketing team for further nurturing. Even if they advance the lead, salespeople sometimes do so by deleting it and re-entering it, thus losing any historic data that may have been associated with it, and the ability to measure the effectiveness of marketing.

However, the CRM can be the right place to pass the baton, when it is connected with the right tools.

How the right software supports effective lead collaboration

The right sales effectiveness platform can be connected with the marketing automation system to create a seamless handoff and collaboration between the two departments. Coupled with a clear definition of what constitutes “qualified” and the ability for salespeople to automatically pass enriched data back to marketing for nurture, such a system measurably improves pipeline quality.

Such a system measures the quality of a marketing lead based on specific criteria set at the strategic level (like an “ideal customer profile”), and only allows leads to pass into the sales department when they have met those criteria. When only quality leads are allowed through, the sales department will highly value them and won’t have to waste time with “useless” leads.

Likewise, the system should be equipped with a clear definition of what constitutes a sales-qualified lead to be converted into an opportunity, or returning them to marketing. In such a system, a salesperson can pick up the phone to learn information that is invisible to marketing, then pass the lead back to them enriched with that information so that the lead can be nurtured with highly targeted messaging. If the lead later becomes qualified again, it will return automatically to the workflow of the sales team.

Membrain provides sales teams with the tools to achieve this alignment. Furthermore, our tools can be integrated with marketing automation to provide seamless handoff and collaboration. We recently partnered with Act-On to create an integrated package option, and can work with your automation software to do the same.

With Membrain, pre-qualification and qualification of leads can be systematized to ensure consistent pipeline quality from the beginning of the sales process. Enriched leads can be passed back to marketing or moved further along the pipeline, based on strategically defined criteria.

This not only improves pipeline quality, but also creates a closed-loop reporting environment, from first contact to a new customer. This enables leadership to measure the joint effectiveness of sales and marketing and make adjustments based on reliable and accurate KPIs.

You deserve the best-in-class sales effectiveness platform for your business. If you’re considering a CRM purchase, read this white paper first. If you ready to get started - just book a time to speak with us.