How many times have marketing claimed to send you a sales lead, only for you to know it’s a dead end? What can you do about it? How can sales and marketing come together to agree on what is a sales-lead and what isn’t?

Firstly, you need to set a definition of what qualifies a sales lead. Is it someone who browses your website, asks to download some of your content or fills out a contact form? Or is a sales lead only established when a prospect does all these things?

If your business has marketing automation, you’ve probably already established a pre-agreed level of activity to qualify leads. However, you don’t need marketing automation to do this. Instead, you can use lead scoring. Lead scoring is an algorithm that you can use on your website or CRM to track each lead’s interest in your business.

Implementing lead scoring on your website is a great way to see leads interest build up as they move around your website. GatorLeads scoring technology uses page scoring to track prospects around a website and then uses a point scoring system to decide whether the sales lead is ready to buy, lukewarm or a cold lead.

Page scoring is an easy way for sales and marketing to agree when a lead becomes a sales lead. For example, looking at the pricing page or filling out a form easily earns more points than just going on the homepage or reading a blog post. Then as the points build up, marketing can successfully qualify the lead and pass them onto sales as a real opportunity.

Secondly, you need to agree on who the lead actually is. Marketing may send you a lead that has built up a great score on the website, only for you to get in contact with the company and find out the person you want to speak to isn’t interested.

This is why it’s important to look at the whole company and find out who the individual is that is interested in your website. They may not necessarily be the key decision maker, but they are the prospect that sales can start developing a relationship with. That’s why visitor identification is also essential to finding and establishing the quality leads on your website.

For further advice when it comes to lead generation, why not download this handy guide that we wrote?