Sales and Marketing War
Marketing and Sales both believe they are the most important department in a company.
Which one of them is right?
The truth is they are both vital and one means nothing without the other and yet they are at war with each other.
Marketing complain that Sales don’t follow up on the leads they generate and Sales complain that Marketing generate low quality leads that are not worth pursuing.
Where is the truth?
The truth is usually somewhere in the middle.
- Marketing doesn’t see which leads end up converting, so they can’t optimise their marketing efforts to generate more of the good leads,
- Sales don’t follow up leads diligently and repeatedly according to the process, which makes evaluation of the quality of leads very difficult.
Michael Boyette, the Executive Editor of Rapid Learning Institute and editor of Top Sales Dog Blog has written an excellent article illustrating the situation.
To summarise the article, Sales reps expect that lead should convert at a first attempt — while in reality most leads convert only after the fourth touch. So when a Sales person picks up and calls a few leads from marketing once it’s not surprising that they don’t convert, however the takeaway for a Sales person is that those leads are of low quality and so it’s not worth following up on them.
According to the research by marketing firm MillerPiercea only 50% of leads get a follow up.
Inside Sales focused on the same and recently performed an extensive analysis across 8,742 companies and found that 38.6% leads are not followed up and extra 32.5% get only between one and three attempts. That’s over 70% of leads having less than three touches.
One of my partners, Toby Pannell, an experienced sales person and manager himself has pointed out another interesting angle to the reason sales people might not follow up.
He suggested it’s about ownership. When a sales person identifies their own lead and follows it up themselves from the very beginning, they are much more vested in converting that lead — it’s their lead, their prospect, their potential client. When they get a lead passed on from marketing, the ownership is not theirs, the lead has been discovered by marketing and the motivation to sell to this particular lead might be lower.
So, what’s the answer to the war between Sales and Marketing?
Transparency.
Transparency and Education can bring peace. It can show which leads from which channels and campaigns have been followed up and what was their outcome. Have they ended up being a sale or did we lose them and why?
Aligning Sales and Marketing, just like transitioning to peace after a long war, is not easy and it doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a lot of dedication and determination to change systems and processes and ensure they get followed up.
It requires patience to explain to both sides the benefits of collaboration and educate them on taking advantage of the new opportunities instead of resisting change.
However when Sales and Marketing align towards the same goal, your company will lift off.
Does your organisation suffer with a heated war? Or maybe it’s more of a cold war situation? Bring in a peace maker and initiate the peace talks.
