If you’re a marketer who thinks you can hand a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) to sales, breathe a sigh of relief and go back to nurturing prospects, you may need to look for another line of work. This is old-school thinking and has no place in a 21stcentury integrated enterprise, especially if it uses a good marketing automation platform.
Sales is a partner, not an internal customer. You need to do everything in your organization’s power to support the people who are trying to convert that lead to revenue. It is a true fact that marketing’s primary responsibility is to produce hot leads for sales but it is also important to participate/contribute after the lead is passed to sales. This could include:
- Assisting sales with running their own qualification process – if one exists – to create sales-qualified leads (SQLs).
- Continuing to nurture the lead during the latter stages of the sales cycle.
- Providing collateral that is designed specifically for late stages of a sales cycle.
- Sharing insights and expertise about the segment that might help to close the deal.
- Generating additional market research, especially about competitors and competitive products.
- Helping to overcome objections.
- Calculating ROI for potential customers.
- Facilitating long term relationships with customers.
- Preventing boundaries between information systems from inhibiting the sales process (poor synchronization, late updates, etc.).
- Leading the way on establishing a collaborative infrastructure and processes to facilitate alignment and integration across marketing and sales.
Of course, the sales organization needs to be receptive to this kind of help. That alone can be a very big challenge.
Don’t let sales fly the plane alone. Be a copilot. Or at least bring them a fizzy drink once in a while.
