“I don’t know what marketing are playing at. How can I be expected to convert this bag of washing they laughingly call hot leads into sales? I might as well go knocking on doors.”........“Sales, what a bunch of prima donnas. You give them a load of qualified leads and they can’t be bothered to follow them up!” 

Sound familiar? While Sales and Marketing are intrinsically linked, more often than not it becomes a behind the scenes battle ground with sales blaming marketing, and marketing blaming sales when targets aren’t met and profits are down.

But now, similar to our coalition Government, the two former adversaries are recognising the potential of working more closely together. The cause of this new found camaraderie? The advent of marketing technology, which is helping shift the politics of the sales and marketing departments, giving them a new way of working together for all round success.

One of the main reasons for the differences between sales and marketing is Traffic, pure and simple. In the past, businesses would get a lead from advertising or promotions, and they could be easily qualified by phoning them up and getting more information. These days however, traffic can come from an increasingly broad range of sources. They may have seen an advert, read a press article, put search terms into Google, heard of you on Facebook or Twitter – the list goes on.

“You generate this traffic but how can we sell to them if we don’t know who they are?” say the sales teams. And this is a problem. In the current market, getting to know your customer, their buying motivations, and situation is key to winning not just the initial sale, but to developing a long-term customer relationship.

If this isn’t a big enough challenge, when this traffic does at some point convert from a prospect to client how can those compelling interactions throughout the sales cycle be recognised and understood? It is these key touchpoints that need to be identified and built into our plans – if we fail to understand them it becomes impossible to adjust the campaigns and processes to replicate the sales success.

What was needed was a way of tagging traffic more effectively and then developing a process that would allow leads to be identified – all straight forward so far – but the real turning point is to have a detailed scoring system that recognises cold leads and allows the sales activity to focus on the hot prospects.

But even with the cold leads, they’re in the system, so rather than write them off as no-hopers, a method was needed to take today’s cold leads and see if they could be sparked into life over time. 

For both hot and cold leads the key is customer understanding and nurturing – whether now or in the future. This shift in focus has led sales and marketing to recognise the value of working in partnership, but it has only been made possible by advances in technology. The ability to track, tag, monitor, and communicate with all leads through a single system means that the politics of selling are changing for good.

 

As with any partnership, the sales and marketing coalition will only work if there is something in it for both parties. For sales there has to be a good supply of qualified leads. If this is not the case they cannot do their job, hit their targets, make their commission and bring value to the business. For marketing they have to be able to see the value in the work they are doing. There has to be some form of feedback loop, some kind of measurement, otherwise it's just working in the dark and they are relegated to a cost centre rather than a profit centre.

There is technology available that brings these two disciplines together - leads can be scored by marketing according to a number of criteria, such as frequency of visits to the site, areas visited, what is downloaded and response to e-shots. Then, when leads achieve a certain score they can be passed onto sales to allow them to focus on those prospects showing real signs of intent, which in turn translates into higher conversions, more revenue and a lower cost per sale. So not only does marketing stop passing on cold leads, they automate the nurturing process, developing them into hot prospects before passing them onto sales at a later date.

 

 

This, however, is not a one-way street. Very much like the political parties in coalition it’s not about forcing two groups of people to work together. It’s more a case of bringing them together because of a shared need and then, once they have collaborated and seen the value in that approach they just might start to enjoy it.

 

Matthew Hall is Managing Director of Profunnel.co.uk, a specialist in lead generation technology.