Is Lead Generation Sales or Marketing?
The short answer: lead generation is the responsibility of marketing.
Usually. I say “usually” for 3 reasons:
- There’s fuzziness to the term “lead”.
- There’s at least one exception to the rule that comes to mind.
- There’s an is-ought problem that you might be experiencing at your company.
Lead generation is generally a marketing thing because:
- it’s a long-term process,
- it involves significant content creation,
- it requires analysis,
- it’s usually communicating 1:multiple vs 1:1.
To be clear: we’re in the realm of B2B sales or a complex B2C sale.
What is a lead?
The word “lead” is one of the more contentious words within sales and marketing. It’s a term that should essentially never be used within the walls of your company.
Why?
Because it’s too vague without a qualifier and common understanding within your company.
Here’s some ways that leads get specified, depending on who you’re talking to:
- A contact
- A sales-qualified lead
- An inquiry
- A sales-accepted lead
- A marketing-qualified lead
- A sales-ready lead
All of these types of “leads” are important. If you’re bootstrapping your company’s sophistication in this realm, just start with defining one well. You can add more later. For now, just one.
What you need to do is:
- Select a term you’re comfortable with and is most important to your company.
- Define that term. Sales and marketing need to both agree on the definition.
- The definition will essentially consist of a set of criteria that you can use to agree amongst yourselves whether or not you’ve got a lead.
- It doesn’t need to be perfect. There will be corner cases.
- It can evolve over time as you understand your business better.
- Write it down.
- Refer back to it.
- Use the term in conversations consistently.
What is lead generation?
Lead generation is actually the wrong term, at least in the B2B world. “Lead identification” or “lead discovery” would probably be more appropriate. Unfortunately, “lead generation” is the commonly used term.
Why is “lead identification” a more appropriate term?
Because the word “generation” implies that you can manufacture leads out of thin air. You can’t. You can do 2 things:
- Attract people claiming they have a need for the problem(s) you solve.
- Identify people that are likely a good fit, but not looking to solve a problem, and try to engage them to help them discover that they actually do have a need that aligns with the problem you solve.
The first approach aligns with inbound marketing methods. The second aligns with outbound marketing methods. Both approaches have their place. The topics of inbound and outbound are too big to get into here.
All other things being equal, most buyers will prefer the inbound approach, and most sellers (given the choice) will prefer to sell to inbound leads.
Why?
“Because the psychology of having someone find what they’re looking for when they want it is far superior than pushing something on someone that they aren’t necessarily looking for.”
In some cases your business model won’t allow for an inbound approach, or maybe your company just doesn’t know how to do inbound. Either way, there is a place for outbound, it just shouldn’t be your starting point if you’re investigating how to sell better.
When should lead generation be at least somewhat of a sales thing?
The only reason I can think of for sales to be a significant part of the lead generation process is if your company is trying to do account-based selling. If that’s the case, some leads will come directly from sales doing 1:1 outreach as subject-matter experts using LinkedIn and similar.
The sales and marketing lead generation battle / frustration
Many companies have sales people that say things like “I find my own leads. Marketing doesn’t hardly ever give me anything useful.” If that’s the case for your company, you’ve probably got an is-ought problem on your hands.
Sales feels alone in the process of finding leads and then closing the business. This is bad. You don’t want this. It creates poor working relationships between sales and marketing.
What’s likely happening is that marketing is more focused on the fluffy touchy-feely side of marketing.
If this is the case, your marketing is broken.
This can happen for many reasons. The root cause is likely one or more of these:
- Marketing is operating in a silo.
- Marketing doesn’t actually understand what you do as a company and what problems you solve in enough detail to engage potential customers.
- Marketing has a twisted perception of what marketing should be all about.
From a lead generation standpoint, I’ll wager that what’s most important to your company are sales-ready leads (SRLs). This is the type of lead that’s ready to talk to sales and meets pre-defined criteria. That’s when sales wants to get involved. Where they add the most value.
Don’t make sales waste their time on someone who doesn’t have a current need. There’s an exception to this: if it’s a potential customer that your company wants to start building a long-term relationship with (those people should exist) based on the role they play and the company they work for, then that’s okay. Otherwise, marketing shouldn’t be just throwing garbage leads over the wall to hit some useless quota.
Don’t make sales waste their time on someone who is not a fit at all. Sometimes it’s unclear if they’re a decent fit. They may asking for help with the sorts of things your company can help with, but maybe their role is a bit unique or it’s hard to tell based on the company they work for if the company is a good fit. Those can get passed to sales. But over time you want to gather feedback from sales and update your criteria to optimize what gets through to sales and what gets rejected.
Next Steps
Lead generation is such a core part of business that it’s worth your time to have a clear understanding.
If you’d like help with your lead generation challenges, reach out for a chat.
