As you well know, a company’s ability to achieve its quarterly revenue objectives is highly determined by the quality and size of its sales funnel. In fact most CEO’s and sales executives spend a significant portion of their time reviewing their sales funnel to determine which sales opportunities are likely to close this or the next quarter.
However, our experience has been that the quality and size of the Sales Funnel is totally dependent on the quality and number of leads that feed into the sales funnel.
Traditionally, marketing works to provide leads for the Sales Organization. However, there are two major issues with this approach:
- Most marketing professionals do not have a sales background and may not have a very good idea of what kinds of leads are likely to close.
- Even when these marketing professionals know what kind of leads to pass to the Sales Organization, they may still pass on unqualified leads because they are not setup to do any further qualification.
There is a missing Link that would connect these two funnels–actually, there are two Funnels missing that would connect Marketing with Sales.
Quality Sales Pipelines are built when Four Funnels Best Practices are in place, integrating marketing and sales so that the Sales Organization only receives leads that have a higher probability of closing in the shortest amount of time.