Sales and Marketing Handshake

You agree that the line between Sales and Marketing these days is almost diminishing and sometimes blurred enough to cause confusion and therefore conflict. Here's a short explanation on Sales and Marketing handshake process and basic benchmarks on which the relationship can start to build up between the two teams.

Metrics that I find useful and I recommend marketers leverage to change the course of their relationship with sales is:

Inquiry to Meeting Conversion % - Simply - of the leads you passed to sales, how many did sales meet? A hidden metric which we come across but we don't often recognize - How many of those leads did the sales 'felt like' meeting? I am raising a debate here, by asking a question which marketers shy from, well because the information about a lead that can be gathered before giving to sales can be literally unlimited and too much information about the lead not just the name, contact details, department etc might not be enough for sales to go knocking the door of the prospect. That's where the SOP becomes a must, to avoid misunderstanding of expectations and deliverables.

Baseline Discussion - Setting the Rules of Engagement: Most important is to setup a meeting with Sales and understand their requirement and help them understand your capabilities to deliver. Sales are the ultimate beneficiaries of all your activities but at the same time, marketing is different from sales promotion. As a marketer, your job also is to establish the organization in the domain as the leader and preferred solution/ product/ services, not just generating leads even though that might constitute a significant part of your work day. Having this baseline helps you set up the boundaries for each others' expectation and deliveries. I believe, overcommunication from both sides helps and lot in charting the future course of action. Next step is how would you do it?

Once you have a baseline, do two things:

1. Agree on a goal WITH sales and an SOP between sales & marketing

2. Start asking questions and analyzing the data BETWEEN teams

Here is more detail:

Agree on a goal WITH sales and an SOP between sales & marketing

Agree on the goal and the timeline for improvement. For example, we want to go from 30% to 50% by the end of the quarter. Next, establish a standard operating procedure (SOP) between sales and marketing where both parties agree on the quality of leads passed to sales and the process by which sales will follow up.

Start asking questions and analyzing the data BETWEEN teams.

Hypothesize and test with data.

For example - if the % is low - this can mean:
A - sales believe your leads are bad (and maybe they are).
B - the sales process for follow-up is poor or not being followed.

Begin breaking down the data to identify patterns and learnings across:

• Lead Type - with intent (demo request, PLG) vs. no intent (event, content)

• Lead source - do different channels perform better?

• Sales reps - what is the process of high performers?

• Industry - doesn’t this matter this early in the funnel?

• Persona - is it easier to get certain profiles into a meeting given the content resonates with a certain kind of persona?

• Education - do more web page visits = higher meeting rates?

• Product - if you have more than one product, is there a difference?

• Etc.

Do this effectively and: Marketing's relationship with Sales will be less about the “# of leads you generate” and more about “the quality of leads you generate.” Sales relationship with Marketing will be less about “all they care about is # of leads” and more about “they are listening when we say what works and doesn’t.”

Give it a shot.