Today, boys and girls, we’re going to talk about something we don’t discuss very much here: what marketing looks like from the sales side of things.
Like we keep hammering home, sales and marketing are increasingly interlocked; it’s very difficult to locate a hard line between the two. If it’s anywhere, it’s in sales’ focus on personal contact, while marketing is all about getting butts in seats. But sales is utterly reliant on marketing in order to have anyone to contact at all; after all, there’s no sense in putting on a show for an empty stadium.
But for marketing to do their job well, you guys have to be working together. Blah blah blah smarketing, I know, but we mean it. Each team fuels the other, and marketing can’t deliver a good number of high quality leads without knowing what sales is looking for, and what sales’ goals are.
So here’s how.
Here’s the thing. Marketers don’t know everything. They have to do a lot of guesstimating and hoping things work out, and then refining when they don’t. And the last thing marketers frequently have access to is sales data or buyer research. Mostly they’re just sitting in their offices, winging it. In other words, they don’t actually know who it is you’ll find most fruitful.
When sales and marketing are siloed, it just kinda tends not to work. Marketers and sales aren’t talking, so marketers don’t know who to go after. So marketing & sales need to sit down together and work out who their buyer personas are – with an emphasis on who sales has demonstrable success at selling to as well as who marketing believes could be fruitful going forward. By developing them together, you increase the likelihood that you’ve gotten it right.
At what point does marketing pass leads on to sales?
Marketing often has no idea when someone is really ready to move to sales; a marketer might think “requested a demo” is a great step, but sales people might have the experience to know that demos alone don’t convert, and more is needed.
So again, you guys need to sit down and talk. There’s no single definition for an SQL, but marketing needs to know what kind of people actually end up buying: what conversion path they’ve been down, how much they engaged, how recently, what information they’ve already gotten? It could be simple, it could be complicated, but if marketing knows where that line is, they know what to deliver leads and when to turn leads over to sales.
That way, you’ll get the right people at the right time.
What if marketing sends you garbage leads, huh? What then?
Well, that’s why marketing and sales need to be talking regularly, but there needs to be a system in place outside of ongoing meetings for sales people to report back to marketing on the quality of individual leads, and for marketing to see which leads are closing. A powerful two-way reporting system will help keep everyone accountable, and see whether marketing is sending bad leads – or if you’ve just got a weak salesperson on your team.
Lastly, you need to regularly meet to review and report progress – and quite possibly to redefine all of the above: your personas, your goals, your reporting processes, your SQL requirements. Conditions change, you learn more, you get more experience – and suddenly your SQLs don’t convert the way they used to. By meeting regularly, you can make sure they stay fresh, and more importantly, stay accurate and effective. You might locate new buyer personas, or find that one of them isn’t performing anymore. You might need new metrics to measure performance against.
In other words, you can increase the quality of the leads marketing sends you by ensuring that sales and marketing are working towards the same goals in tandem. You have to build up the idea that they’re one team after one thing: revenue.
