Converting Your Marketing Qualified Leads

Is Your Prospect Ready For Sales

Once the Prospect has shown intent to buy, the next step is having your Development Team qualify to ensure that the Prospect matches your ideal customer profile and is ready to make a purchase. This step is about protecting your Sales Team.

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Why You Want To Gate Your Sales Team

At the beginning of your journey in SaaS, it may seem that you would want anybody interested in your platform to be able to speak to Sales. The reality is, this isn't probably the most ideal.

I've worked with numerous SaaS organizations where the Development Team has been organized like a call center, calling out to numerous Contacts who have shown no intent in buying and asking to set up a meeting.

The Problems This Drive In Your Organization

Most companies have no idea who their ideal customer profile is and indirectly end up doing business with anyone under the sun. There are no criteria for who they are reaching out to, often it seems, if they have a heartbeat, call them.

When you operate your organization like this, what you'll see in the long run is a lot of churn because although there could be interest and possibly even purchase, because they aren't the exact types of customers you want to do business with, you either:

• Can't deliver on the promises you've made because your customer support is set up to serve a different type of customer
• They can't find value in your product because it's set up to serve a different customer

So of course, the next thing you'll want to do then is broadened the types of customers you serve and make the platform more ambiguous but the moment you do that, it makes it 10x harder for your customer service team to do their jobs because they're working with so many different types of people you'll probably see burn out with that team and also remember the quote,

"The moment you try to be everything to everyone, you become nothing."

The Real Dangers Of Bad Gating

Not only does this burn out your Development Team, but it's also going to end up pushing the wrong people to your Sales Team which is going to clog up your pipeline on the sales side as well and bog them down because they are going to be talking to people that have no desire to buy.

Further down the line, this also makes your forecasting dirty because the numbers are inflated instead of the actual representation of what is possible.

In the long run, this will cause trust issues with investors if they are always seeing a high volume of Prospects passed to Sales but not closing, they will end up asking what is wrong with Marketing, Development, Sales, the Platform, and all the other noises in your organization trying to find the problem which leads to a giant blame game within your entire organization.

Ultimately, it's just lousy gating and prospect targeting.

Perks Of Gating Your Sales Team

The perks of gating your Sales Team are simple. When your Development Team is qualifying in this stage, they can gather all the necessary information via the client or third-party tools like ZoomInfo so that by the time the Prospect passes to Sales, they are armed with all the information required to make the perfect pitch and should be closing at a much higher rate than normally seen at a SaaS company because Sales is only engaging with Prospects that:

• Match the ideal customer profile
• Have the budget needed for purchase
• Shared they are ready to buy within a given time

Once these three concerns have been answered, then the Development Team can pass them on to Sales Team.

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Booking Conversations With Sales Qualified Leads

This stage in the journey seems straightforward but can cause some big problems if done improperly. This stage is all about limiting friction so that it's an easy pass to Sales and there are no easy ways for your Prospect to say no to moving forward.

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