Eye To Eye

How do you perceive your internal sales organisation? And just as pertinent, how do they perceive you and your marketing function more generally? Ask yourself the question…

Too often in my experience, I encounter the same observations from clients as to the capability of their sales teams - ‘very good at leveraging their long-standing customer relationships, but not interested or particularly strong at proactively chasing new business or following up on my marketing initiatives.’ Sound familiar?

But why is this the case? Could it be that they’ve had their fingers burned in the past spending hours following up huge volumes of apparently ‘great’ leads delivered by marketing that simply didn’t live up to their billing. Or perhaps it’s simply that they want to ensure they receive full credit for any new business they cultivate as opposed to being perceived as being spoon-fed their leads by marketing.

Too often there seems to be an inherent mistrust between the two born from a misunderstanding of respective roles and responsibilities. Yet achieving a seamless integration of the two continues to be critical to the success of most marketing campaigns.

Creating sales team ‘buy in’ is the challenge (easier said than done you might say!)

It’s therefore important to create a positive experience for your sales team in following up a marketing initiative, which will help with proof of concept going forward – make it manageable (no salesman is going to want to follow up 400 sales leads in a week in addition to his or her existing workload). Involve them early in your strategy and once they see that the marketing effort has been properly thought through and clearly targeted, you’re halfway there.

This case study is a great example of the impact full sales and marketing cooperation can have. Highly targeted and with follow up manageable for the sales team from a resource perspective – therefore no excuses!