Let’s talk about how companies can work to improve the seamless connectedness between their lead generation activities and their sales activities. A lot of companies have many, many disconnects between the parts of the organization that actually generates qualified leads for the company, i.e. usually marketing, and those who actually convert those qualified leads into sales opportunities and close new business for the company - in other words, the sales team. Typically, there is a large disconnect between several functions inside both marking and sales that produce these actual leads and turn them into qualified business opportunities for the company. Part of this is cultural.

Many companies have a cultural divide between their marketing and their sales departments that produces a rift, and often times silos those two parts of the organization to function into very separate and distinct mindsets. There is often times turf wars and turf struggles associated with marketing, versus sales, in many organizations and there are very few organizations that actually take an integrated marketing and sales approach and truly have a unified culture between the two sides of those two functions. So this can produce rifts and finger pointing and turf wars. All those kinds of things between marketing and sales and that leads to disconnects in how marketing and sales work together, in terms of taking opportunities and turning them into new business.

So for most organizations the number one challenge is getting marketing and sales to take a unified approach. We believe that unified leadership of the marketing and sales effort is the first key to that, and in our own experience, companies that perform best have one single senior executive who are both marketing and sales oriented and have a strong belief in the two. When you have separate VP’s of marketing and VP’s of sales reporting to a CEO, many times those are strong personalities which are advocating for their own resources, sometimes to the detriment of each other, and can lead to breakdowns in teamwork and communication and finger pointing.

A good lead generation and conversion process starts with the notion that leads have to come in the door at a steady, predictable flow through various marketing activities. Our own feeling is that in today’s day and age you don’t have to be spending nearly as much on traditional trade shows and advertising as you do on more guerilla marketing activities, which are heavily now oriented to the internet, particularly search engine optimization, pay per click advertising using Google, AdWords and Yahoo Search - those kinds of activities are the ones that best produce the best qualified sales leads. And of course, being able to do that you have to have a web site that has a strong search engine visibility, strong connections to the key words that are used for contextual search by your potential customers, and strong offers and conversion mechanisms, once a potential customer gets to your website. But the first disconnect that happens between many companies is that actual leads that are processed or taken in by web marketing activities or other are not followed up on and many times it’s because a company doesn’t have anybody whose specific responsibility it is to follow up and qualify those leads and provide fulfillment services to them.

Second of all, a lot of times when they are followed up on are done too late and on an untimely basis and with the wrong kind of follow up. So when a company spends money to generate leads through its marketing activities, it needs to make sure that it has a dedicated resource, either on a temporary basis or a permanent basis, who’s responsibility it is to follow up on every one of those leads, and incubate them and nurture them to such a point that they actually turn into a qualified prospect for the company.

The next disconnect that happens in generating seamless lead flow into a company for sales acceleration is, even though leads might be followed up on by a dedicated resource, often times they are not handed off on properly to sales people and often times sales people view leads coming from sales people suspiciously. They don’t believe that they’re worth working on. Part of the issue is the “not invented here” syndrome that comes from sales people who believe that they are the only ones who can actually find and develop new prospects in their territory so they’re generally pretty suspicious about marketing and lead generation activities. And that leads them often times to give very low priority for following up on the leads that do come from marketing.

So, one of the things that needs to be done is you need to work hard to get your sales people to understand the value of those leads from a company, how much a company is investing, and generating those leads through its marketing activities and hold them accountable for following up on those leads and really showing that they’re following through on them. Sometimes it makes good sense to even incentivize them through spiffs or recognition programs to make sure that they are actually following up on those leads. But there is a variety of ways that you can actually deal with this. The key is, sales management needs to view the lead flow coming from marketing as being an important source of new business opportunities and hold its people accountable day in and day out, to following up on those opportunities and converting them into qualified sales deals that can be worked on.

About Cube Management

Cube Management delivers sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions (whether recruiting, interim management or consulting) that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results. Download the Cube Management Inside Sales Guide and the Cube Management Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide.

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