This article describes the concepts of sales ready leads and marketing qualified leads using marketing automation to improve your sales effectiveness.

1. How to consistently
generate sales ready
leads
This short article A major cause of firms missing their sales targets is a lack of sales ready
leads. That is, leads that are ready to buy at the point at which they
leads you through a engage with your sales team.
systematic process This article takes you through a systematic approach to creating sales
to generate sales ready leads. This paper is a joint collaboration between Jonathan Calver,
the managing director of StrategyMix, a g2m solutions partner and myself.
ready leads,
sigificantly boosting Define your targets
your firms sales and It is crucial to start with a common understanding within your firm of your
marketing target audience. Sales and marketing need to be aligned around this
definition.
efectiveness.
But aligned around what? The answer is the buyer, and the problems and
challenges they are facing that you are excellent at solving. Avoid
By Chris Fell
Managing Director, g2m solutions becoming internally focused at this key early stage of proceedings.
and Jonathan Calver, Managing To whom do you plan to sell your solution, what sector and what size of
Director, StrategyMix,
www.strategymix.com company? It is also vital to include the different job roles that will have
influence over the purchasing decision. This is called your ideal customer
profile (ICP) and is an important concept in generating sales ready leads.
Do not underestimate the challenge of identifying the real decision makers
in your prospects. Many of our clients are shocked when they perform a
gap analysis on their current clients let alone prospects and leads!
Consider using telemarketing to fill the gaps in your contacts database of
key roles.
To how many? How large does your sales funnel need to be to achieve
your sales targets. What are your current lead progression rates? How
much time does it take for a lead to progress through your funnel? Know
your sales funnel “maths”.
What does a sales ready lead look like? Marketing and sales need to
agree on when a lead is ready to be handed over to sales. What
information do sales need to be effective in following up that lead? Sales
people’s time is precious and limited, it is important they are devoting
energy to the leads with the best prospect of closing.
Build a list of ICP targets
Now you have your definitions and your maths clear, you need to find a
sufficient quantity of names that match your target profile. In many cases
firms spread the net too wide, the more names the better right? Wrong!
This is about how small you can make your target market and how
0402 340 250 chris.fell@g2msolutions.com.au www.g2msolutions.com.au

2. focused can you become and still hit your numbers. If you have been How do you keep
smart about your targeting, you will increase your close rate and
subsequent margins by focusing on your ICP. track of all your leads
simultaneously and
Understand the buyer’s journey ensure you send them
Buyers commence their purchasing journey blissfully unaware they even the appropriate
have a problem, however something occurs in their organisation and that
state changes; they become aware they do indeed have a problem. They information at exactly
show interest in fixing this problem, they define a specific need and they the right time? For
start looking for suppliers who can solve this problem. Eventually they
select your firm's product or service and become your customer and start
most marketers this a
receiving the value they paid for and, if they have chosen well, remove challenge beyond
their pain.
them because they
So the buyer’s journey is a deliberate cognitive process. lack the capablity to
implement one on one
campaigns sending
targeted material to
specific individuals at
a specific point in their
buying journey.
Buyers can start their buying journey at different times and progress at
different rates, but above all buyers don't skip steps in this journey. Of
course some times these steps may occur rapidly, perhaps even within
one meeting, but buyers consciously move from stage to stage and state
to state.
This raises some very significant challenges for marketers. How do you
keep track of all your leads simultaneously and ensure you send them the
appropriate information at exactly the right time? For most marketers this
is a challenge beyond them because they lack the capablity to implement
one on one campaigns sending targeted material to specific individuals at
a specific point in their buying journey. They rely on mass marketing
techniques.
Later in this article we will discuss how smart use of technology can
conquer this challenge.
Develop marketing collateral for each stage of the
buyer’s journey.
Think about how different collateral will be needed at different stages to
influence buyers. In the early stages of the buyer’s journey collateral will
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3. The shift away from typically be generic pieces, say white papers or a blog, that position your
firm as someone who is capable of solving the buyer’s problem, however
one to many mass once a contact has expressed interest your next step might be to use a
marketing, to one to telesales team, invite them to an event or webinar that you are running,
where a product demo is taking place. Much later in the process, perhaps
one marketing using at proposal stage, specific case studies of solutions your firm have
technology is a implemented for other clients might be most suitable. So marketing’s
fundamental shift in challenge is to develop collateral using a different range of media, suitable
for the differing stages of the buyer’s journey.
the way we think
about marketing. Developing automated marketing campaigns
Away from the idea of Now it is time to rhythmically send out your marketing campaign material
sending out 1000 to your individual buyers. Without the use of some smart technology this
task is overwhelmingly complex and time consuming.
emails to a 1000
The shift away from one to many mass marketing to one to one marketing
prospects, to the idea using technology is a fundamental shift in the way we think about
of sending out 1000 marketing. Away from the idea of sending out 1000 emails to a 1000
prospects, to the idea of sending out 1000 campaigns, where each
campaigns, where campaign contains multiple campaign elements which adjusts to the
each campaign response of each recipient, using logical campaign rules.
contains multiple Logical Campaigns
campaign elements Logical campaigns form the backbone of the marketing campaign. The
which adjusts to the logical campaign dictates which recipient is engaged with which piece of
collateral and in which media. (e.g. email, event, phone or meeting)
response of each
Logical campaigns allow you to control the campaign interval and the
recipient, using logical number of repeats. A very simple example would be where the rules of
campaign rules. the campaign state that you send email 1 in week 1 and then in 7 days
time you send email 2 if the prospect responded to email 1. If, however,
they did not respond to email 1 the system would automatically resend
them email 1.
More likely a logical campaign will consist of a number of marketing
elements and there may be a series of linked logical campaigns taking the
buyer through their buying journey.
Profile surveys
At the beginning of this article we outlined how important it was to gather
market intelligence on your Ideal Customer Profile contacts. Active profile
surveys are very effective ways to do this.
Before a prospect consumes a piece of your marketing content you ask
them a series of short questions. You assign certain values to each
response according to what your “ideal” customer looks like. For example,
a CIO from a medium sized firm in NSW and Victoria in Australia. The
system scores the lead’s responses and assigns an action depending on
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4. the response. This action may range from qualifying them out of all future
campaigns to getting a sales person to call them immediately if they
achieve a perfect score compared to your ICP criteria.
As an example you might rate those prospects who come in the top 20%
as “hot” prospects, and the next 30% as warm prospects and the bottom
50% as cold.
Smart responses
Once you understand the relative value of a lead you can assign a series
of different actions from sending an automated email to your BDM, adding
the lead to a specific list code, sending a specific piece of collateral such
as a brochure, insert that contact into a separate logical campaign, say for
inviting to a high value lunch with one of your senior executives, or
inserting them into a follow up telemarketing campaign.
Reviewing campaigns
An important and valuable part of automated marketing systems is to
review progress. Reports can be generated that tell you the relative
success of different forms of campaign, the number of sales qualified
leads you have created each day, week or month, if you have enough
target companies in your database and any number of other helpful
reports.
This allows you to assign your precious sales and marketing resources to
those tactics that yield the best results and those leads that are most likely
to buy from you.
Your next steps
If this article has stimulated your interest in improving your firms ability to
generate a consistent stream of sales ready leads from your targeted
audience then it has done its job. The question is, what should you do
next?
Contact Chris Fell using the information on the footer of the first page or
clicking on chris.fell@g2msolutions.com.au . He can discuss your
requirements with you. Perhaps you would like to request a demo of the
StrategyMix automated marketing system and see some of the powerful
features we have discussed for yourself.
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