Challenges with sales focus in prospecting tool

[EvieSchellens]

Hi Community!

Our sales team has been using the prospecting tool, but they are finding it quite challenging and somewhat cluttered. Our main goal with the prospecting tool is twofold:

1. For Marketing: To gain insights into what’s happening with leads and to assess the quality of incoming leads.
2. For Sales: To help them maintain focus and efficiently manage their follow-ups.

However, our sales team is struggling to maintain focus. They feel that they have to click through too many steps to get where they need to be. Moreover, they are still heavily relying on their tasks to manage follow-ups.

Currently, our process is as follows:

• Every whitepaper download (lead) or demo request (MQL) becomes a Lead, and sales receives a task indicating that a Lead is ready in the prospecting tool.

I’m wondering if anyone here has advice on:

1. Maintaining Sales Focus:
   Our sales team currently has about 100 tasks, leading to a backlog in the Leads section within the prospecting tool, causing them to lose focus on who to follow up with and who not. Has anyone else experienced similar challenges? What strategies have you used to help your sales team stay focused?

2. Tracking Success in the Prospecting Tool:
   In the prospecting tool, we are looking for a way to indicate when a whitepaper download has been successfully followed up on and becomes an MQL. Currently, we only have the stages: New, Attempted, Connected, Qualified and Disqualified. When someone is marked as Qualified, a deal is created, and they immediately become an Opportunity. However, we are missing insight into when a whitepaper download is successfully followed up by sales (and has to became a MQL)—it just stays in the Connected stage. Does anyone have best practices for tracking this in the prospecting tool?

[kennedyp]

Thanks for your detailed post @EvieSchellens! 

I would love to refer you to this thread which has a handful of great resources and recommendations about the Prospecting Tool from some of our experts. 

I'd like to invite a few of them to chime in on this specific use case as well. @karstenkoehler, @Jnix284, & @Lucila-Andimol -- do y'all have any suggestions or best practices to share with @EvieSchellens? Thanks in advance! 

Best, 
Kennedy