Your Sales and Marketing Teams Are Misaligned
There are two situations here: marketing passes along so many leads that it’s just not feasible for sales to follow up individually, or marketing passes along enough unqualified leads for sales to develop a tolerance. Sound familiar?
The core issue is that marketing is focused on scale: their job is to bring qualified leads to sales, and as many as possible. Sales, on the other hand, is entirely about the individual — they’re focused on closing the sale in front of them right away, regardless of whatever else is going on. To better align the two, marketing needs to deliver leads that are more qualified for sales to close. This might mean:
- Delivering fewer leads overall
- Taking longer to warm leads before passing them off
- Building a funnel or a drip campaign specific for leads that sales has lost
The result of these sorts of actions (and there are lots of ways to do this) is that the sales team will trust the leads they get more and recognize that while they might not have as many, their close rates will be higher – something every salesperson likes.
Optimizing your sales funnel doesn’t have to be a huge overhaul of everything you’ve ever created. Most of the time, it’s small, minor tweaks that enhance your ability to drive traffic, keep leads warm and engaged through the middle, and pass more qualified leads on to sales to close.
One final word of advice: if you’re really serious about finding and patching the leaks in your funnel, the most important thing you can do is track everything. It’s the only way to really drill down it what works, what doesn’t, and what you need to change to keep more money in your pocket and grow your business.
–written by Daniel Matishak
Daniel Matishak is the co-founder and CEO of Mindable, a 50-person global marketing company that identifies different markets online for building competing websites. A version of this article originally appeared on the author’s blog.
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