Lead Fulfillment Moving Inquiries to Sales

Every sale begins with an inquiry, but that doesn’t mean every inquiry will result in a sale. As a marketing professional, you are tasked not only with generating initial interest in your company’s products and services, but also with filling the sales pipeline with qualified leads and helping your sales force close the deal. Having a formal lead fulfillment process will help you in each of these roles.

Inquiries are expressions of interest, but they don’t necessarily indicate an intent to buy. In contrast, qualified leads are prospective customers. This is where you want to focus the bulk of your marketing time and budget.

The first step in converting inquiries into qualified leads is defining what “qualified” means to your company. Marketing and sales often have very different opinions about this. For that reason, it’s important that both functions work collaboratively to develop a consensus with regard to key factors like industry, region, company size, purchasing influences, purchasing budget, purchase timeframes, and similar variables. Agreeing on these elements up front gives marketing a precise target for lead generation programs and collateral development. It also creates sales buy-in to the process, which generally makes sales reps more willing to follow up on leads.