It was about ten years ago that we published an article in one of our printed B2B Insights magazines called “the Sales-Marketing Gap.”  In it we talked openly about exposing B2B marketing’s “dirty little secret” -- that leads from marketing aren’t really what a sales rep would call “sales-ready.” Not only are they not “hot leads,” but, for many, you’d be stretching it to call them “lukewarm.”

Fast forward now to the present and you see the situation is even more exaggerated. B2B marketers whose primary focus is lead generation have used the new media to find all kinds of ways to get prospects to identify themselves online: newsletter signups, ask an expert forms, access to premium content, and even hard copies of catalogs or product information on disk.

Meanwhile our colleagues in B2B sales are even more hard-pressed to stay in touch with their existing customers, let alone cultivate leads that may take months or even years to convert to sales. So they have less time than ever.

Personally, I think we can do our sales colleagues and ourselves a great favor if we cleaned up our language and stopped calling these marketing contacts “leads.” We’re simply dumping the equivalent of raw data on them, and getting a predictable response: “these leads are no good.” We’ve got to do better than that, for the sake of both marketing and sales.

In most cases, “marketing leads” are certainly not “sales-ready,” and may not have a clue what the product is and how they would benefit. We’ve done something to pique their interest and get them to sit up and take notice. And that’s all good. But they’re not ready to buy.

Now, admittedly, being “ready to buy” is not the sole factor in determining what constitutes a lead. We should be considering so many other factors, like sales potential and the relative advantages of our solution. In fact, we in marketing should be discussing those criteria quite openly with sales:

• Specifically, how many sales organizations have changed their criteria for a lead over the past 10 years?

• How many sales organizations, in turn, have actually informed their marketing departments of those changes?

• And how many marketing departments, in turn, have adjusted their marketing practices to align with the changes in the sales criteria? 

In all-too-many B2B companies, marketing and sales have continued to operate as ships passing in the night. And we owe our companies more than that.

Now here’s marketing’s part of the “dirty little secret”: if we’re not sending these leads off to sales and washing our hands of it, then what ? The question strikes at the heart of the divide between the “old” marketing of “spray and pray” and a revolutionary new idea for marketing: lead nurturing.

The key idea is that marketing contacts have given us permission to market to them and we should be taking advantage of that. That permission, of course, is not a blank check: it comes with some strings attached. We should start by providing what they requested. If they gave us permission to send them an e-newsletter, we ought to fill it with information that will help them do their jobs better. If they asked us a question, we ought to provide a solid, thoughtful response, not recycled product promotions.

And that, in turn, allows us to increase our knowledge about that person. What their concerns and hot buttons are. And what might potentially interest them among our products and services. In essence, we help them to learn more about us and make it easy for them to provide the information that would qualify them as a sales lead. Self-qualifying, if you will.

The result is a new standard for marketing promotions of the future. Not simply how many junk leads did you pass onto sales, but how many contacts gave you permission to market to them?  And how many of those contacts were we able to turn into a qualified sales lead?

Let’s allow the term “sales lead” to be exactly what it sounds like it should be: a contact who specifically asks to have a sales rep contact them.

And understand that a member of the audience who gives us permission to market to them is at the beginning of the marketing process. Not the end.