Many companies generate leads, but do not track how those leads convert into new accounts. It is important to have feedback and insight from your sales team. To really bridge this gap between sales and marketing you need to cultivate a team that cares about the others success.

This Gap between lead generation and closures might be related to the quantity of leads that your team is providing your sales personnel. Quality, not Quantity matters. Sales Reps need fewer leads – more accurately they need fewer raw, unfiltered, unqualified leads. A marketing manager who focuses on generating more leads and reports a 25% increase in lead generation, while keeping CPL under $100! is not considering lead qualification, how leads are nurtured, nor considering what the salesforce has done with previous leads.

The true measure of successful marketing should be how well marketing creates sales opportunities that have a high opportunity of developing into sales. The true measure of sales should be how well they close these good leads. To close this marketing and sales gap the next marketing report should say, “this month marketing added 14 new prospects to our Prospect Development Program. A total of 41 sales opportunities are currently under development by marketing. Sales received 10 fully nurtured sales opportunities representing $3.5 million of near-term revenue. Please see summary report below.”

The report should have 5 data points – company decision maker and contact information, revenue potential, first contact date, # of weeks nurtured by marketing, # of program touch points, Hand-off to rep date and decision “expected by” date.

This report closes the gap and focuses everyone on ROI by leveraging time and resources to leads that are qualified.