“Quality is caused, not controlled.”
#DIRFT, or (Doing It Right the First Time) is a phrase that has come across my radar a lot lately. The absolute critical importance of quality is a point that was raised on my April Fool's day post.
While researching some relevant quotes for the content for in Smarketing Step 7: Qualify, I realized that most of the battles happen between sales and marketing when the discussion of how to qualify is raised.
One simple alphabetical letter difference between qualify and quality. So closely related in spelling and meaning, and both have the same weight of importance to both sales and marketing.
Why Marketing Alone Will Never Be Able to Generate Quality Leads
Oh, I dared. That is almost like saying inbound marketing is all you need! But sadly it is true. Not for lack of trying mind you. Marketing has a lot of numbers and stats to show how they qualify, and that is all a necessary tool to have available.
But who is marketing to tell sales how to qualify and what quality leads are? Who actually interacts with the customer here?
If in fact marketing can not generate quality leads, whose fault is that? Better yet, how do you change it?
2 Ways You Can Fix a Lead Quality Problem
1: Evaluation- How quality is defined, needs to be determined by sales because they are the ones doing the qualifying. Because of the importance of sales responsibility to both the customer and the company, sales must be evaluated. Sales ability to qualify prospects to be eventual customer evangelists (the key to real growth) will be directly impacted by any weaknesses that they may have. Even their ability to collaborate with marketing effectively and relate what a quality lead is and how to qualify them is effected.
Get More Information about Sales Assessments.
2: Look for the no- It sounds opposite to the sales objective of getting someone to say yes, but if you are looking for quality, not quantity, then looking for the no means you must slow down. By coaching sales people how to slow down and put the best interest of the buyer first, your lead quality problem will not only disappear, you are now going down the path of creating customer evangelists.
Why? Because when sales can tell marketing what the no's that they are looking for are, (what are the red flags?), then you are going to get higher quality leads that are easier for sales to qualify as ideal customer matches.
