November 27, 2009
What is the most important part of the sales process or is it the whole process that is important. It is easy for the sales team to blame marketing for a low volume of sales and vice versa. I recommend something that is seldom seen in the business world; mutual respect and team work. It is amazing how the two departments that need each to succeed and can go toe to toe day after day. The million dollar question is how you prevent this from happening.
The Sales Side
“We need leads� is heard a lot from a sales team. It makes complete sense that business intelligence helps create leads and that is a function of the marketing side of the equation. Where does this intelligence come from and who decides what is useful and how useful it is:
The questions above are important and finding out the answers is what create the silver bullet. Marketing must develop a model to find leads based on industry trends, competition in the market, and past behavior. Sales should be equipped with an easy to use contact management system to pull leads that ideally are ranked and segmented for immediate use. The Sales team’s time is best spent making contacts and creating opportunities, not mining through data.
When choosing a contact management tool it’s important to understand your users. In my experience, the sales team wants to see basic information to plan their week and easy to use screens to navigate through to input pertinent information about the sales call. Anything present in the data that isn’t important to selling is clutter and clutter causes confusion, which in turn slows the process.
The Marketing Side
The job of the marketing team is to create a buzz. How can anyone live without our company's products or services, and if they already have them, how can they live without the upgrades and enhancements. I am a marketer so excuse my simple explanation of the marketing departments’ work:
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Research the industry
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Find the competition
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Create a buzz
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Determine who makes decisions
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Communicate with the target
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Equip the Sales team with tools for success
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Maintain a high level relationship with clients
A successful marketing team does everything above plus much more. The important point to understand is that the Sales department can’t function efficiently without direction from marketing on where to focus.
In order to create an efficient sales process, marketing must provide tools for success and to keep the cycle going and marketing needs feedback from sales. Information exchange is a two-way street so everyone must contribute. Let’s rewind a tad and reiterate the need for a good contact management tool. Marketing needs the ability to create reports, analyze data, and develop a model that the sales team uses to find opportunities. A simple contact management tool for the sales team and a robust tool for the marketing team is available when you can customize the system. The right software package enables both parties to input data and find the nuggets of information that help the company succeed. Without feedback from the sales team marketing isn’t sure what works and can’t make intelligent adjustments that ensure success.
The Answer… In My Opinion
When the market is good and success is easier to find we can coast a bit but that doesn’t mean we should. When times are tough and the economy looks as it does these days, the blame game rears its ugly head. Always be prepared as they say in the Boy Scouts. The last clear chance doctrine is at the heart of our judicial system and if you think about it, it’s at the heart of the sales and marketing blame game as well. If you know follow-up is a problem, don’t sit and wait for the problem to occur, create a plan to prevent it. Structure your tactics to include forced follow-up.
There are variables, elements, circumstances, behind the scenes politics, and so on there should be one clear goal; create and maintain a thriving company. If we aren’t working together to create success for our company, why bother working at all? The last clear chance doctrine is used to place blame on the party responsible for allowing an accident to occur when neglecting to take action to avoid the accident. If leads aren’t good or they don’t target the right audience, give feedback and have the model adjusted. If follow-up is a problem then plan for it in your program or campaign. If sales aren’t coming in then debrief and figure out the issues so the problem does not persist.
Business is full of opportunities and unfortunately missed opportunities. The goal shouldn’t be to blame the other side; we need to reflect, adjust, and succeed.
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