3 Lead Management Mistakes Marketers Make That Stunt Sales Growth—and How to Avoid Them

It's no secret that marketing and sales departments don't understand each other. Both groups are crucial to the success of a business, yet they tend to work apart, lacking common strategies, processes and technologies. This split can have serious consequences for the bottom line.

Marketing departments can be all too eager to send to sales every prospect who has ever downloaded a white paper or registered for a Webinar. Sales often considers such leads as unqualified and therefore unworthy of their time. Even less strategic for the company's bottom line is when salespeople dutifully follow up on each and every Bob, Jack and Sally that offers up contact information. They end up spinning their wheels chasing down prospects who aren't interested.

By developing a strategic approach to lead management, marketers can avoid common pitfalls that halt sales growth. For example, fixing these three common mistakes can help transform your lead-marketing activities into a cohesive and powerful lead-management program that boosts sales and demonstrates the value marketing brings to the organization.

1) Failing to agree with sales on what constitutes a qualified lead.For any company with a sales force, the definition of what comprises a "hot" lead is often a much-debated topic. If you're not already on the same page with your sales organization about what constitutes a qualified lead, you need to be, as this is the first step to successfully developing a powerful lead-management approach. When you're able to send sales a list of prospects exhibiting criteria that indicate a propensity to buy, they will be more likely to engage in meaningful conversations with leads rather than spending time needlessly chasing down cold opportunities.A solid lead-scoring approach not only helps sales to rank prospects against each other, but can smooth the lead flow and help you build a more powerful and accountable marketing organization based on rigorous analysis and testing, rather than intuition and educated guesswork.

2) Relying solely on self-declared prospect information.Self-reported data, such as demographic and firmagraphic information, can be vital as you correlate attributes of leads that generate sales. For example, you might find that mid-size companies in the Western United States appear to have a greater affinity for your product than those on the East coast. You could adjust your marketing efforts and lead scoring techniques accordingly.Although valuable, the information prospects provide such as occupation, company name, company size, and timeline to purchase can also be unreliable: Self-reported information tends to be aspirational as people give answers they believe are more desirable; company information tends to roll toward the mean as people at very large companies downplay their size while those at tiny companies pad their numbers; and people sometimes lie because they do not wish to reveal personal details.To avoid relying on inaccurate information, a solid lead-management approach should also take into account a prospect's behavior, such as Web-site visits, white paper downloads, email opens and clicks, etc.

3) Not accounting for recency and frequency of prospect behavior.The first behavioral component is the action itself. But beyond that, you should also account for the recency and frequency of the behavior--how often and how recently a person took an action. The quality of a lead changes both over time and as more or less interaction with the prospect occurs. For instance, consider the difference between a prospect who takes a product demo today and another who took it six months ago. The behavior is the same, but the person who most recently took the demo is more likely to be in an active phase of the buying cycle.

The art and science of lead management is critical to streamlining the lead-to-sales process and improving marketing ROI and impact on company revenue. And a key attribute of top-performing B2B marketers is their ability to build processes and systems that effectively track and manage leads. Lead management has traditionally required a lot of hands-on maintenance. But fortunately, powerful tools are now available that automate these processes for marketers. Now, by fixing a few avoidable mistakes, B2B marketers can focus on what's really important--the bottom line.