Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

Passing the Baton from Marketing to Sales

When marketing and sales teams agree upon and establish a lead scoring model, a company using Revenue Performance Management methodologies is ready to continuously rank its leads and define when a prospective buyer should be moved forward into a sales campaign. But first, let me emphasize the significance of continuously scoring and ranking leads. Lead scoring is not something you do once, or even once a month. It is a continuous process. Buyers’ scores could change every time they take action—say, visiting a web page or attending a webinar. That’s how you are able to respond instantly to signals from your prospects, and get the hottest prospects in touch with sales right now. And you need a software system to implement that kind of process on a corporate scale, which is the topic of Chapter 20.

Continuously ranking lead scores makes it much easier to determine which leads to pass on to sales: the best ones. Depending on the level of your sales staffing and capacity relative to the size of your revenue pipeline, that might be the best 1 percent, the best 5 percent, or even the best 50 percent. Moreover, you can alter these threshold levels at any time to adapt to variations in sales capacity or business conditions.

Of course, as discussed in Chapter 12, leads that turn out not to be sales ready, and those that get stalled somewhere in the sales process, should be recycled for further nurturing and development until they are ready to come ...