Common sense will tell you that a lower volume of high-quality leads beats a higher volume of low-quality leads any day.
Not only does is waste your sales team’s time to sort through and call on tens (or hundreds) of unqualified, low-intent leads every week that marketing is sourcing for them, but it destroys any trust that sales would ever have in marketing.
The result:
Sales and marketing diverge into silos that will never be in alignment, working as a team to achieve meaningful, revenue-focused business outcomes.
Despite all this, very few manufacturing organizations are patient enough to do the marketing groundwork that will attract and engage the right people from the right companies (who actually have buying intent). So things play out exactly as described above.
Here’s the shift that has to happen
Marketing needs to stop doing lead generation for the sake of lead generation.
Marketing needs to instead shift its attention to:
- Focusing on the right people from the right companies
- Learning deeply what matters to these people (triggers that lead them into the buying processes, issues they’re trying to address, outcomes they’re trying to achieve, questions they’re trying to get answered)
- Create amazing content that addresses those things
- Proactively and consistently distribute that content in front of these exact people in places where they already consume information online
- In the process of doing so, earn attention, build trust and open the door to sales conversations when these people enter a buy cycle
