Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Addressing the gap that can exist between marketing and sales seems to be a continual issue in most work environments I’ve been a part of. The inside sales teams usually do what they can to help bridge the gap, since we are generally caught up in the middle. Don't get me wrong, selfishly it's in our best interest to make sure all parties work cohesively since our comp is tied to their collective success.

But again, we always seem to land right back where we started. Marketing feels that sales isn’t putting enough effort into following up on their leads, and sales doesn’t feel they are worth following up on to begin with.

Inside sales can help to qualify the leads they receive from marketing in order to further clarify a prospect’s need, but at times that still isn’t enough to build up the confidence in the quality of what the sales reps are expecting.

Typically our first instinct is to simply encourage an open communication between teams. For the sales team this could mean that your inside reps spend more time communicating directly with their outside team about specific leads they’ve sent over. On the marketing end the inside team can provide real time and open feedback on what campaigns are working and which ones are a bust. While this is an essential starting point, unfortunately as I've learned on many occasions, open communication with everyone involved can help the situation but it usually doesn't help to fully solve it.

What we've found is that the only way to get everyone on the same page is to provide reports that offer a graphic representation what we’re experiencing being on the front lines of the sales process. As a result, marketing is happy because they have a thorough understanding of the inside team’s progress on their campaigns. While the sales rep can get a much better sense of the effort it takes to uncover and arrange a sales meeting with their target prospects.

Here are 5 reporting examples we feel are critical to capture to keep both marketing and sales on the same page.

1. Conversation Report:  Whether we deliver this daily, weekly, or monthly reports, marketing and sales need to see what we are hearing in the trenches when we speak their prospects day-to-day. This gives everyone a feel of conversations that took place within each campaign, the reasons for interest, no interest, and potential interest at a later date.
2. Tracking Inaccurate or Bad Lead Data: Most of the time we don’t put enough effort into doing an analysis on the amount of inaccurate contact information we receive from all of our lead sources. I mean c’mon, how many of you actually take the time to contact Jigsaw about each individual email that was kicked back to you from a list you purchased.
3. Categorizing for Lead Nurturing:  With the tremendous unrealized opportunity that exists in the prospect universe that is not ready now, you need to find a way to adequately track the prospect that may not have an immediate need but will at some point down the road.
4. Visibility into Campaign Success:  An analysis of the lead rate by campaign, pipeline contribution, and ultimately closed business will give you a more accurate picture of where you are getting the best marketing ROI for each campaign.
5. Effectiveness of the Inside Sales Team:  Analyzing leads passed by rep, connect rate, quality of the leads being passed to the outside sales team, and the percentage of leads passed that covert to closed business will demonstrate comprehensively, whether your team is meeting their objectives.

These reports provide a detailed analysis and visibility into nearly everything that relates to these lead generation objectives and will thus be an essential communication tool that will help unite sales and marketing with a common goal.   Completely bridging the gap between sales and marketing is a tall order, however providing this level of detail will at the very least put everyone on same page.