Sales Ready… Marketing Ready – Fight!

Which statement do you believe?

 - Marketing is a function of Sales

- Marketing operates besides Sales

- Marketing operates with Sales as a function of Marketing

I found this table that Marketing Sherpa released. It shows the ownership of responsibilities and activities in relation to sales leads.

Amongst other things such as what is marketings role in lead generation, engagement and conversion? This tables throws up an extremely valid question – who owns leads in the B2B marketing world?

According to this breakdown a number of things are a little startling:

1. Only half of B2B marketers use a CRM system to manage the leads process. 

Not everyone has to use a CRM system, thats fine, so long as you are genuinely monitoring the leads process. A CRM system is the accepted way of working though. Why? Because it is essential that every lead has a montiored and recorded lifecycle in the marketing and sales process. From acquisition to becoming a client (and I would argue that through the customer lifecycle) each contact should be recorded, segmented and monitored in order to move through the lifecycle correctly.

2. 55% Do not collaborate on what makes a lead.

Well here the issues really start. Marketing could argue that anyone who shows an interest in anything to do with your business is a lead. Sales could go to the other extreme and argue that only leads that are qualified against rigid criteria and essentially all the pre-sales is done should be considered leads. Now in my humble opinion neither of these lend to a pleasant working relationship and certainly neither are an effective model to move forward. Being able to work together on defining what works for both sales and marketing is important, but what is really key is having the openess of relationship to review the lead qualification criteria regularly.

3. 66% of B2B Marketers do not measure lead generations contribution to revenue.

Then how do you measure the effectiveness of marketing activities designed to attract, capture and convert new business? What is really astounding here is that I really do know B2B marketing managers who are actively recruiting new business opportunities (leads) but have no clarity on what their efforts mean to the bottom line.

Now, Im about to open a can of worms… but what is wrong with marketing having clear targets for lead generation based on the attainment of new business revenue? I firmly believe that a marketing led business should inform its marketing strategy with the breakdown of targets by product line/sales team/segement however works best for you. This way you know where you are heading and can ensure that everyone is pulling in the same direction.

4. Rating and nurturing leads.

The function of lead generation marketing is to Attract, Engage and Convert. Without an effective method for doing this you can’t move leads through the marketing lifecycle. It means you cant target your marketing to different stages of the groups, so new contacts get downloads, warm ones get invited to a webinar and hot get a one to one meeting offer complete with sign up discount.

5. Passing leads back to marketing.

This is essential to determine the success of lead generation in terms of quality, but can also be used to identify the gaps in the sales/marketing process. Dont forget, leads = money! 

There are leads that sales people themselves will want to own and evolve. There will however be leads that have qualified out on budget, a delay in the project, the decision maker has suddenly gone off long term sick. These leads should not be lost. You have invested time, effort and money into moving them into a hot prospect, so ideally they will stay with the sales person to follow up in a 6months but also get assigned back to marketing to ensure maintained warmth through newsletters, whitepapers and special offers that will start them moving back up the sales funnel again.

What’s the fight really about?
Realistically the battle between Sales and Marketing shouldnt exist. Both are essential to the business and both have a crucial role to play in the growth of revenues over time. However, marketing, unlike sales, should be about the identifcation of opportunities; opportunities to attract new business, opportunities to improve engagement, conversion and ultimately client retention rates. Marketing should also be concerned with plugging the gaps in the process, and it isnt possible to do that until you are successfully tracking, monitoring and evaluating every single opportunity and how it moves through the marketing and sales pipeline in your business.