How to Sell More, Faster.
Blame. When targets are missed, sales and marketing professionals are expert in deflecting criticism. Sales managers and executives have great fun complaining about poor lead quality and spend hours telling stories of wild goose chases where there was no chance of a sale, no likelihood of budget or the ‘prospect’ had just had their retirement party.
Marketing have their own self preservation mantra: salespeople are slow to follow up the leads provided, marketing never get feedback from meetings and therefore are not able to pre-qualify leads because sales ‘just won’t let us know what they really want.’
This bun fight, played out in boardrooms the world over, would be amusing if it weren’t so serious. The fact is the company has missed its targets: a situation that simply cannot be allowed to continue; jobs depend upon a successful solution.
Where it all goes wrong.
It’s management’s fault.
Poor performance, missing targets and tension between sales and marketing teams is the result of uncoordinated objective setting by senior management. Often marketing will be incentivised to deliver a ‘volume’ of leads. The larger the pile of leads, the larger the bonus, so lead quality suffers. Salespeople on the other hand are focussed on revenue; they do not have time to ‘nurture’ an opportunity which may be years in development. To hit their target they need to grab the ‘low hanging fruit’.
Getting it right
Buying is a process.
Sales are closed when a buyer has gone through a logical ‘journey’; from becoming aware, through market search, evaluation and due diligence to purchase. Sales will not be won where a buying stage has been missed. Marketing and sales have a role to play at each stage and setting objectives which acknowledge that sales will only be secured through lead development and profiling.
The problem for management is not the theory, it’s the practise. A lead profiling process is all well and good but the ‘baton is often dropped’ as marketing hand the carefully nurtured leads over to sales. An answer to this issue may be emerging:
Experienced decision makers familiar with Salesforce.com, SalesLogix and other sales force automation tools may be interested in a system that integrates logical lead profiling with salesforce.com. It might provide the ‘glue’ that enables true ‘closed loop’ marketing and gets sales and marketing teams working as, teams.
Lead Profiling To Accelerate Sales is a paper by StrategyMix that helps senior management get insight into their marketplace, build intelligence on ‘target’ accounts and implement a lead profiling system that will help you win more business faster.
The paper is available Here
Posted: September 7th, 2009 / 3 Comments /
3 Comments to How to Sell More, Faster.
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This post is awesome, I’m gonna put this in my bookmarks before I misplace the link, I don’t believe I’ll ever find my way back here again otherwise
network security threats on
January 1st, 2010
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Thank you Katelyn
MG1 on
February 5th, 2010
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A thoughtful opinion and ideas I will use on my website. You’ve obviously spent a lot of time on this. Congratulations!
Sony Cybershot on
April 4th, 2010