One of the topics I discuss in my book Sales Shift – how inbound marketing has turned sales upside down making it more difficult and more lucrative at the same time has to do with the difference between a “prospect” and a “market". Marketers traditionally speak and think in terms of their market and their product positioning. Sales professionals, on the other hand, are a little more focused on their prospects' challenges and the positioning statements that are related to those challenges. As inbound marketers have generated leads and salespeople have started selling to those leads over the past five years, marketers and salespeople have had trouble coming up with the right way to talk about the differences between a "market" and a "prospect".  Pete Caputa (@pc4media) and Mike Volpe (@mvolpe) discussed some of these differences in recent blog posts.

• Mike's: Don't Assume Your Prospects Know Your Positioning
• Pete's: Don't Assume Your Prospects Care About Your Positioning

First of all, let’s talk about the difference between the two and let’s use my business as an example. I've created an ebook called "Tips for Selling to Inbound Leads". A variety of people complete the form on the landing page and download that content. In my case, these are  sales people, marketers, sales administrators and even other sales consultants like me. All of these people are in my market, but none of them are viable prospects for me. That said, I still see value in calling these people. Unfortunately, most salespeople do not. Most salespeople don't know how to identify if any of these leads could lead to an opportunity somehow. What most salespeople will say if asked is, "these leads suck". If marketing is asked, they'll often say something like, "These lazy salespeople will only call the leads that say, 'Please call me. I am interested in buying your product.' Usually, both salespeople and marketers get frustrated.

What SalesPeople Should Do

Did the lead really “suck”? In my case, when sales people or marketing people download my content, it is usually indicative of a problem that exists in their company, or atleast a topic that interests them or someone they know. The lead may not be the right person inside that account who would make or even influence the decision to hire me.  But that shouldn’t stop me picking up the phone. Here are two approaches I've taken that have worked well for me:

1. When evaluating the quality of a given lead, salespeople must focus less on the “whom” and put more focus on the “why”. If people are visiting your site, reading your content and then downloading your offers, aren’t these all evidence that their COMPANY is a good prospect?  Consider using that as a clue and just call the decision maker.  I have done this personally several times and had some great results; sales person downloads my e-book on "lead conversion" and I call the Sales VP and say: “Did you know that a bunch of your salespeople have been downloading my e-book on lead conversion?”
2. The other approach that I take is: I will call the lead even though I know they aren't the decision maker. During that call, I try to learn more about their and their company's goals and challenges. This conversation sometimes leads to great things such as turning that influencer into a champion; getting an internal referral; getting a referral to another company, or just making a new networking contact.

Often times, I make these calls in parallel.

How Marketing Can Help

I have spoken and written several times about sales people becoming more involved in content creation. They should. But, marketing can help generate higher quality leads too, with just a bit of help from sales. Too often, marketers create content in a vacuum, without much feedback from sales. When writing your content, you need to think less about the end user and more about the decision maker and their evaluating process. Don't be afraid to lean on your sales team for guidance. Here's a few tips:

1. The title of your offer needs to appeal to the desired prospect. In my case “How VP’s of Sales can Improve Lead Conversion” is a more prospect-appropriate title than one that appeals to sales people. So, although my e-book that was titled “tips for selling to inbound leads” was one of the most downloaded pieces of content, I might have benefited more if I had fewer downloads by the right people.
2. The buyer persona should be the decision maker. Most Inbound marketers do a great job understanding the psyche of the buyer and then attempting to create content based on that. The problem I see is that too many of those personas are based on “end users” (a larger group of people that is easier to reach) and not the economic decision maker (a much smaller group that is harder to reach).  Take a whiteboard and identify the decision maker in the last 20 deals and write your content to that “persona”.

As a whole, inbound marketers do a great job generating a large quantity of leads. Many of these leads aren't destined to become qualified opportunities. Some are, though. By creating content for the decision maker and a more patient sales approach, more of these leads can be turned into opportunities.

Editors note: Listen to Frank's Sales Shift webinar from April 5^th. It provides some additional guidance on selling to inbound leads. View the webinar here.