Does marketing or sales own lead qualification?

I am of the view that this is a false dilemma. Lead qualification is definitely co-owned. A lead that is not qualified is NOT a lead. It's a prospect. Marketing is of course responsible for identifying "hand raisers" or prospects and setting them aside for future "nurturing" as the first order of business.

Following that step, Mktg (or one of their outsourced telemarketing partners) is usually accountable for first level lead qualification of those prospect to make sure that BANT criteria are met before a relatively expensive sales resource is asked to spend time on it. The BANT-qualified leads then get passed on to sales or channel partners. When sales/channels get involved the BANT qualified opportunity gets further qualified with the salesperson personally engaging the customer and asking deeper, probing questions. THe ones that pass that filter enter the sales funnel.

Nick,

Not sure I agree with where BANT is measured. Nor am I totally sold that BANT should be measured. In 23 years of sales and marketing, I can think of tons of deals that were identified, pursued and closed with prospects that never would have qualified as BANT worthy.

I wrote an article on it last year: http://www.green-leads.com/b2b-blog/bid/19168/BANT-It-s-Not-Always-The-Lead-S...

Mike

I believe the answer is straight-forward,based on the length and consideration of the customer's purchase cycle. Let's take two extremes: a consumer's purchase of AT&T mobile phone service versus a mid-market enterprises's purchase of SAP's ERM software. In the former marketing is generating demand, but any response should be driven to a sales-centric call center. The consumer is making the decision quickly and on the basis of just a few factors. Price is also transparent - the offer is "shrink-wrapped". In the case of SAP, the decision for a mid-market company to purchase a $100,000 ERP license may be considered over many months, may involve many buying groups and influencers, and is something that often warrants a more significant budget approval. In this case, marketing should also provide scalable lead management, lead nurturing, and lead hand-off, so that the sales force can operate a 90-day funnel.

I think it's all pretty much sales for qualification, and marketing for generation, a good arrangement incorporates most of Michael's suggestions but if you run a lead generation campaign in the press with a phone number to call for example, that phone number should be directed to the sales department not the marketing department.

I agree with Michael - it's a joint process that needs to be agreed upon by both marketing and sales. Marketing should be responsible for the front end qualification to meet agreed-upon criteria for "qualified lead." If a lead does not meet all of the criteria it should stay in marketing's hands for nurturing until it IS ready. Once you've thrown the qualified lead over the wall to Sales it is their responsibility to gather further info to determine if the lead should continue in the sales cycle.

Mike, you make valid points and I would totally agree...in my years in marketing I also saw many non-BANT leads that closed (and many BANT leads that ended up in the garbage). Having said that though, this doesn't mean you don't put BANT leads on top of the list. I think it's simple logic. Leads where you have money in the budget and a person with authority and a need ready to act, are simply a better statistical bet than leads without those characteristics. If I was a salesperson getting a bunch of leads from marketing...which do you think I'd rather spend my time chasing first? BANT or non-BANT?

Again, the premise of your point is also correct. Non-BANT leads can prove quite valuable as well and should not be set aside. That's what a lead nurturing program can do for you. Keep them warm and engaged until such time that they are ready to make a move.

Slightly different philosophies I guess :-)

NIck

I tend to agree with Micheal. Elements of BANT will define if a lead is qualified, but not all is needed for it to be seen as qualified by sales. This NEEDS to be a joint decision between sales and marketing leaders, and maybe the definition of a quality lead will differ by sales group or client segment, country etc. The question is can the technology keep up with this amount of segmentation and different rules that is really needed.
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Hi, this is an interesting debate which has brought out different angles and ultimately not a clear answer, which ironically is the answer, it is an individual situation. In my time in both sales and marketing I have met sales guys who understand and appreciate marketing and qualification and I have met many marketeers who can sell, I have also met a lot of the opposite. I believe the true answer is to have a clear and visual process connecting the two departments, in fact I opened a company to achieve just this www.leadreporter.com
All leads need to go through a journey before they either become customers or not (yet). This journey needs to be modeled, send it to the right sales person, did he or she respond quickly, do they accept it as a lead, does it need further qualification, next action, the list goes on. However if this process is driven through one point and is fully visual, real time (cloud) judgments can be made before it is too late, rather than try to work out why it failed. Ultimately it is not a question of who should own the lead it is a matter of who DOES own the lead!

www.leadreporter.com

For me this depends on how much you pay your salespeople (BEFORE commissions!). I'm sure we all agree that salespeople need to maximise their time in front of well qualified decision makers. However, many business owners don't appreciate that there are often much more cost effective processes to get to that stage. They see cold calling and qualification as part of the sales process, which is fine, but it doesn't always make sense for the sales people to be involved this early in the cycle. The T for Timing (mentioned by NIck above) is absolutely critical, because customers will only buy WHEN THEY ARE READY. Naturally your best salespeople MUST be involved in briefing those involved in any Marketing/Telemarketing process because this is a critical stage in the Relationship Building and Business Development. If it's just about making appointments then quality will suffer in favour of achievement of targets. I know a multi-million pound business that will send its best salespeople out to meet with clients on the strength of a simple web enquiry. The salesperson often has absolutely no idea what to expect. These guys are on commission only and are not even paid petrol expenses, so this self-employed sales force is effectively subsidizing the business. I'm sure that if they were paid travel expenses the business would make a qualification phone call if only to assess what stage the customer is at in their BUYING PROCESS and to decide whether it's worth sending a salesperson out to visit. In conclusion, Marketing should own the corporate contact database and the lead qualification process, Sales should own the qualified active prospect/customer (or Account).

You are so correct Peire. In most cases it simply does not make economic sense to have your most expensive field based sales people chasing hand-raisers who are not ready to move yet. Makes more sense to nurture these until they reach the right level of maturity....where a salesperson has a reasonable chance of moving them over the line. As Jamie said above, this is not a one-size-fits-all environment but I'd say most high value, high touch sales environments at least would line up with this model.

Thank you everyone for the banter back and forth on this. First of all, there is a new string on the role of BANT in the qualification process here: http://www.focus.com/questions/marketing/bant-dead-has-todays-buyer-made-bant...

In regards to Sarah's question whether sales or marketing should own lead qualification. I get asked this ALL the time. It's uncanny. And my answer is very simple: the most important factor is not whether sales or marketing owns lead qual, it is whether you have dedicated reps and process focused solely on qualifying and converting leads into opportunities or SQLs. If you have people that are qualifying as one of the many things they are doing, you will fail. When sales owns lead qual, there is a never-failing problem of the lead qual reps getting involved in admin work for the outside rep...while the sales reps think this is the best thing for their territory, they are wrong. Lead qual reps need to be comped solely on the number of leads they convert/qualify. (they can get bonus based on revenue).

When marketing owns lead qual, the problem is integration with sales. If you have a wishy-washy lead definition and/or no buy-off from sales...this doesn't work either.

So; my answer is "i don't care" --its more important that the lead qualification process is a focused and dedicated function.