Situation

This client had the classic disconnect between sales and marketing regarding leads. Marketing generated large numbers of leads and believed it was doing a fantastic job helping sales grow their pipeline. Sale believed that they were starved for leads.

Diagnosis

Upon examination, we discovered that the sales team merely cherry picked leads to follow up based on the perceived size of the deal rather than systematically working the leads to identify all the potential opportunities. Very little feedback between the departments made it nearly impossible for either department to see the real disconnect.

Cure

We implemented a well managed Sales Development Rep team that was tasked with contacting every lead generated by marketing and identify those leads that warranted immediate follow up by sales, those leads that needed additional marketing nurture and those that were junk.

Result

After roughly six months time, the sales pipeline was more than doubled and the client was seeing deals actually closing that were identified by the SDR team. Marketing was getting good feedback from the SDR effort and was able to improve their lead generation effort resulting an a 40% improvement in the MQL to SQL conversion rate.