Tech Marketing Blog

“Sales hasn’t followed up on our leads”

I can’t count how many meeting I have been in where a CMO of a technology company has expressed this frustration.  All of the planning and great content generated for a marketing campaign can fail miserably if the sales and marketing teams are not aligned.

This is not a new problem to any of us in the technology industry. The sales cycles are long and complex and after the initial marketing effort it is not uncommon to be focused on another daily activity. Of course, many of  us tech marketers have adapted our marketing efforts to a more nurturing strategy to address the tech buyers fickleness. By planning ahead , an effective nurture strategy can balance the timeliness of message delivery, the marketing tools, and the content of the tools.

But a sound nurture strategy not only relies on multiple touch points and a longer time frame to reap the ROI benefits, it relies on the sales team.  The sales team play a critical role in the success of this effort as they need to be aware of the marketing efforts being pushed into the market as well as play a role in follow up. In fact, Sales activity often triggers some of the follow up marketing components within a longer nurture strategy.

How much revenue is sitting idle in your pipeline? Ardath Albee provides four very practical suggestions for smoothing the  hand-off of leads between marketing and sales: 

1. Develop a reciprocal SLA between sales and marketing.
   • Get agreement on requirements for a qualified lead.
   • Establish and agree to a timeline for sales to formally accept them.
   • Have sales agree to contact accepted leads within a specific time period.
   • If sales passes on a lead, make sure they can hand them back to marketing with an explanation for the rejection. That way marketing knows what needs to happen to get the lead accepted in the future.
2. Create a Sales Enablement Handoff Brief
   • Help salespeople get up to speed fast and take action in line with the lead’s expectations.
   • Provide the lead’s activity history during nurturing.
   • Include an overview of the related nurturing program.
   • Given the lead’s last interaction, provide conversational snippets, messaging and collateral suggestions to help sales initiate a conversation.
3. Integrate extended Nurturing into the Sales Process
   • Marketing can create nurturing touches on behalf of the assigned sales rep and execute for them until the salesperson indicates it’s no longer necessary.
   • Make sure the sales rep knows what marketing is doing.
   • Shift the messaging for late-stage buyers.
4. Facilitate the Introduction of the Sales Rep to the Lead
   • Humanize the process. When you want to introduce one person to another, you don’t just hand off their contact info and walk away. You introduce them. Why shouldn’t the same respect be paid to people you hope to do business with? It really is about the relationship. People buy from people.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 5:33 AM and is filed under Tech Lead Generation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.