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.
Our experience has been that the quality and size of the Sales Funnel is, in turn, totally dependent on the quality and number of sales qualified leads that feed into the sales funnel.
Four Funnels: Linking Marketing with Sales
Traditionally, Marketing works to provide leads for the Sales Organization. However, most of the leads provided by Marketing are not quite ready to buy. They are in the very early stages of researching or gathering information.
In other words, many of the leads are not quite ready for sales engagement. Passing these on to Sales only wastes salespeople’s time. Salespeople are good at low-volume, in-depth conversations. They are not good at high-volume, short duration conversations that are necessary to determine which of these leads are ready and which are not.
There is a missing Link that would connect the two and make Marketing work well for Sales. Teleprospecting is what takes the large volume of warm leads, qualifies them through short conversations lasting 2-5 minutes, and passes on ONLY those that are ready to seriously engage with Sales. We refer to these as Sales Qualified Leads or SQL’s.
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.