Does Your Identity Management System Need More Qualified Leads?

According to MarketingSherpa an estimated 61% of B2B marketing teams automatically send all leads directly to the sales department. This turns out to be a wasted effort for both sides because only 27% of the leads will be qualified ones.

Sending a steady stream of leads to the sales team is a marketing department’s responsibility, but if most of those leads are worthless, nothing is gained. To close more sales and grow the company, identity management providers need to increase lead quality. Here’s how.

Adopt Inbound Marketing Strategies

Outbound marketing—which consists of cold calls, direct mail, and other disruptive strategies—have traditionally been favored by marketing teams because they cast such wide nets. The problem is in this instance, quantity and quality are not the same things.

Inbound marketing uses techniques designed to attract audiences who are more likely to make a future purchase. It involves the creation and distribution of content that a company’s ideal buyer finds relevant and useful. Refining the lead capture process in this manner will create more qualified leads than outbound marketing methods.

Align the Goals of the Sales and Marketing Teams

In most companies, the marketing team is responsible for sourcing sales-ready leads and passing them on to the sales team, which follows up and seals the deal. By generating more qualified leads, your sales and marketing teams have to embrace shared goals and actively engage in each other’s strategies and approaches.

Before more sales-ready leads are generated, the marketing team must understand what a lead should look like. A dedicated meeting with the sales department can clarify this important detail.

Use Aligned Buyer Personas as a Blueprint

A surprising number of companies use buyer personas to help direct sales strategies. Companies have one persona in theory, but two in practice: one used by marketing and the other by sales. A shared buyer persona needs to be created using:

• Sales team insights on what type of buyer typically represents a long and profitable relationship
• Marketing feedback on where this type of prospect is found

A focused marketing campaign targeting an aligned buyer persona may theoretically result in lower lead numbers, but more of those leads will be qualified ones. When it comes to the company’s bottom line, quality matters more than quantity in this respect.

Use Data to Assess Lead Quality

Lead scoring can be improved significantly by studying prospect historical behavior. Discussions with the sales team and a review of analytics can provide the marketing department with a better understanding of which behaviors signal an imminent customer conversion.

For example, if someone who downloads a certain white paper on a management system will traditionally make a purchase soon afterward, anyone who does so is a qualified lead to pass on to sales.

Understand the Buyer Process

The buyer process is a succession of touchpoints that a consumer moves through from initial awareness to final purchase. When a marketing team strengthens its understanding of how the process works, it can provide potential buyers with the right kind of information at the right time, increasing both the likelihood that they will eventually buy and their value as a qualified lead.

Bottom Line

Generating leads is easy. Getting qualified ones is the hard part. However, by encouraging an aligned and collaborative approach within the company, an identity management system provider can greatly improve the quality of its leads and prosper as a result.

Are you looking to establish more qualified leads? Let us know in the Comments below.

To learn more about how identity management system providers can create more qualified leads, be sure to watch the free, on-demand “Identity Management Revenue Growth Acceleration Q&A Webinar.”