In my previous post – Sales and Marketing: Mind the Gap, Part 1 – I talked about the innate challenges and issues that arise between Sales and Marketing teams that create this gap. So how do we bring the teams together? First, you need to create that stage-gating process outlined in Part 1 to ensure that everyone is in agreement about what constitutes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and when that should become a Sales Qualified Lead (MQL). Once you have established these criteria together, it’s time to move on to the second part of the solution:
Joint Campaign Development
Huh? For you salespeople, you may be thinking, “That’s Marketing’s job!” But take a minute to think about this. You have taken the time (hopefully) to create a joint vision for the different lead types but from here, both teams need to come together to agree on the messages and story of the campaign, as well as the desired actions that you want people to take, i.e. attend a webinar, download a whitepaper, etc. Why wouldn’t you want to work with the marketing team to maximize the responses and put more deals in the pipeline?
By gathering the entire sales and marketing teams together to think about the business objectives and the campaigns that will help to help achieve these objectives, these become JOINT EFFORTS that everyone has bought into. This endeavor brings a shared focus to the critical business issues that need to be solved and the “story” of the campaign.
Address the following together:
- What are the key messages that you need to get across?
- What are the objections that need to be addressed?
Next, how will you translate these to:
- Email campaigns
- Calling scripts
- Events like webinars
- Resources like eBooks and blog posts
Determine specifically “who” will do “what.” In this way, both Sales and Marketing have joint objectives and specific tasks that they have agreed to. Building a short, compelling sales story with call scripts and objection handling also ensures both departments will “stay on track” during the sales process, creating focused activity that you, as the sales rep, can then leverage.
Then comes the hard part: making the 500 calls to get the webinar attendees and/or the follow up from the whitepaper and eBook downloads to the next stage. Be sure to remove distractions; that means no CRM data entry and no email. It’s just you, the phone and your list. See how effective you can be by timing yourself and test the impact of your calling blitzes with the stories and objections for that campaign in front of you. Stand up and remove your chair from your office while making your calls – you may be surprised to find that this brings more energy and drive to your efforts. You can drive massive activity in lead follow up when you truly “smile and dial.”
When everyone rallies around the product message and associated activities with an end-result of increased sales opportunities that lead to revenue, you all win.
To learn more about connecting your Sales and Marketing efforts, send me a note or give me a call.
