August 31, 2010
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New Chart: B2B Marketing-to-Sales Processes

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SUMMARY: In this week’s chart, you’ll learn what tactics are most commonly used by B2B organizations to manage their marketing-to-sales processes, such as the scoring or rating of leads, collaborating with sales to define sales-ready leads, having a process for nurturing leads that are not sales ready, and more.
by Jen Doyle, Senior Analyst

How Organizations Manage Their Marketing-to-Sales Processes

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Which best practices are marketers not using to manage their marketing-to-sales process? The one that stands out here is the ability to hand leads back to marketing when they’ve proven to not be sales-worthy. These leads are typically qualified prospects that simply aren’t ready to purchase. And not having a process to handle these prospects is a missed opportunity that allows these future sales to slip through a gaping crack in the pipeline.

Lead scoring has become an important element of the marketing-to-sales process. More than half of business technology organizations have a system to rate leads.

Assigning points to various lead characteristics determines a lead’s "score." But many scoring systems have become overly complex, often discouraging marketing and sales from using them diligently. Originally, scoring was simply based on a few descriptive words, such as "qualified" or "warm" and as such, was easier to use.

For additional research data and insights about B2B marketing, download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s 2009-2010 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.

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