Is Your Marketing Company Keeping Your Sales Team Busy?

The world’s best salespeople have customer relationship management and field sales qualifications, not marketing degrees. Even so, it’s probably your sales team who profiles your clients and decides how and why to follow up on leads; a role they’re simply not trained to fulfill.

It’s no wonder burnout rates in the field fuel a minimum annual staff turnover rate of 20%. Sales can be a soul-destroying job, but your marketing company knows how to breathe new life into your team while amplifying your lead quality and quantity. Job burnout responds beautifully to a more goal driven approach, so by embarking on the brave new world of smarketing, you win on both counts.

The Sales and Marketing War

The misalignment between marketing and sales has dominated the corporate world ever since the marketing industry was born. Baffled directors are rarely clear about which sector should define a qualified lead, how it should be generated, and how much funding should be applied to nurturing. There’s a reason it’s becoming common to integrate sales teams with a marketing agency: companies who align them experience an average growth increase of 20%.

The Death of the Silo

The traditional silo approach stopped working when a huge chunk of sales shifted online. Forbes aptly calls experiments in the integration of marketing and sales teams “Franken-Stacks” because few companies have figured out how to solve the problem intelligently, but don't overcomplicate it. Those buying lists from data vendors need to have in-depth knowledge of every buyer persona their company is marketing to. They also need the freedom to act on low conversions so that every resource generates only the most dazzling returns.

In essence, involving marketers in your lead nurturing is like turning a solution into a concentrate. It makes sure your lists have more “active ingredients” so that every single lead delivers the best possible results.

If you’ve ever tried hitting a bull’s-eye blindfolded, you’ll know how difficult it is to acquire high-performing prospects as a salesperson. Without all the demographic information in front of them, your team can’t find its target. Your marketing company should be identifying prospects that are in keeping with your strategy, following up with supportive content, and maintaining account based intelligence based on how the market is interacting with your brand.

Amplifying Morale

Your revenue leans heavily on the morale of your sales people. We’ll give you one guess as to what puts them in the highest spirits. If you said, “money”, you’d be right. Could it be more obvious? Success breeds success, and stagnant sales are your fastest track to even more stagnant sales. Your marketing company can raise the success of every sales interaction by populating lead lists with consumers who actually want to buy your product (even if they don’t know it yet).

These days, buyers change so quickly that staying in touch with the specifics of their behavior is a specialized skill. Only your not-so-humble marketing company has the laser focus necessary to identify the ripest prospects.