As powerful as search marketing is for B2B lead generation, it has ironically served to increase the ages-old friction between sales and marketing. This is because when buyers use search to research solutions and find vendors, they are extremely early in the buying process—often long before they are ready to engage with sales.

Passing these early stage inquiries to sales only serves to annoy the buyer (who doesn’t want to speak with a sales person yet) and to hurt the relationship between sales and marketing (since sales reps don’t want to waste their time on leads that are not in an active buying cycle).

Of course, there will always be some leads that are truly “hot,” so B2B marketers need a way to find the hot leads and pass them to sales before a competitor contacts them or they go cold. At the same time, the majority of inquiries will require further lead nurturing before they become sales ready, so marketers also need the ability to know when to try to nudge the prospect to the next stage and when to pull back and give the prospect some space.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 9:34 am and is filed under SEM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.