There can be any number of website leads in your pipeline at any time, but which ones should you be calling? Which ones are sales-ready? Which ones should you be spending time on? Let us tell you.

Your hot leads

Of course, your priority should be your hot leads. These could be determined by any number of features. Perhaps they are an inbound enquiry that has been all over your website. Perhaps they have been sitting in your pipeline for months and are finally convinced that you are the provider they want to go with. Whichever way they come from, these are the leads you should be following up first.

What you need is a way to know that these leads are hot. Personally, we use lead scoring to keep track of our leads. As they show higher levels of buying interest – from being on the website to calling the sales team – their score increases. This way, we know the minute these leads are sales-ready. THESE are the website leads you are calling.

Your warm leads

Now, warm leads fall into slightly murkier water. You could call them up and charm your way into convincing them to go with your product. On the other hand, you could just annoy them to the point that they become cold towards working with your company. So, the alternative is to place them in an auto-nurture campaign until they make the first move. This frees up your sales team to focus on the hot leads that will actually convert and leave the warm leads to marketing.

Your cold leads

Clearly, these leads are not your priority and should not be the first on your to call list. Cold calling is dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. Don’t get us wrong, outbound calling isn’t gone. But cold calling is. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be calling people that you know are, or could be, interested in your business. It’s all about targeting the right audience.

When sales and marketing work together all this is not only possible, it’s doable.