Last week I attended the webinar entitled “Improve Lead Generation and Clean up your Pipeline” sponsored by NetProspex.  Oh where do I start…

Really, when are sales people going to stop whining about how the gap between them and marketing is so huge yet do everything in their power to make sure it stays that way.  Sales folks…don’t you realize that if you would stop being so egotistical that the marketing department could be the best friend you never had?  I am tired of sales people giving these presentations about how to improve lead generation.

In a CSO Insights white paper, “Improve Lead Generation and Clean Up Your Pipeline” the first paragraph says, “The key to improving performance is having better leads to work and shifting more of the burden of generating leads to marketing.” Um…okay…Isn’t lead generation a marketing function? Although I agree with the subject of this paper regarding the ongoing disagreement between what sales calls a lead and what marketing calls a lead, I have to strongly disagree with the statement, “50% of leads were reported to have been self generated by sales reps.”  Sales reps must have been the ones who reported this!

And as an aside:  One way to improve lead generation…make sure the title of your event directly relates to its content.  There was nothing in this content that taught me how to improve my lead gen activities.   The content presented also did not reflect the white paper (not to mention that the white paper was written by sales people).  This was strictly a sales presentation and a sales pitch on the products of the vendors presenting.  Hey guys, please see my upcoming white paper on the top 20 mistakes in lead gen.  It might improve your qualified lead ROI on your next event and next time, try to talk to sales people about being more effective at their jobs (selling) and talk to marketing people about how to be more effective marketers.  Both of these approaches will result in better leads and more closes.

But I digress…

I am truly sick and tired of sales people talking about how they do it all and marketing leads are just ‘icing on the cake’ as I heard today.  I also heard things like “sales teams generate most of the leads themselves” and “sales is more critical than marketing”.  As I do have to agree with the latter in the respect that yes, without sales your company will cease to exist but without marketing, without the act of telling people about your company/product/service no one will listen to you when you try to sell them something!

Oh and really, I think the best part of this presentation was the statement, “marketing needs to hand off a lead ONLY when a prospect is actively buying”.   Wow.  So sales, you want marketing to work the lead all the way through the cycle and hand it to you ONLY when the prospect is ready to buy?  Why would I do that when I’ve done all the work for you?  So you can make the commission on signing the contract?  What is it you get paid for again?

One of the biggest issues I’ve had in the last 20+ years, being both on the sales side and on the client side as a marketer, is the constant need for sales to perpetuate the sales vs. marketing feud.

In order to be successful generating any kind qualified lead, sales and marketing teams need to work together from the beginning.  They need to become a team instead of rivals.  Here are a few ways in which your company can instantly improve it’s communications between these two teams:

1. Marketing – when you’ve decided to start a campaign, have a kick-off meeting and make sure that sales is represented.  If you have their input from the beginning on what is it they need to see in a qualified lead from this campaign, really, what their expectations are or what it is they want, you will have a much easier time designing your campaign AND you won’t have to hear all the whining once the leads start coming in.
2. Sales – make sure that you are represented in campaign kick-offs.  Make sure you are clear on your expectations and that you voice what you want but please make sure that you are reasonable too.  Please don’t ask for a lead to be delivered to you only when they are ready to sign on the dotted line…seriously…do you really think that this would ever happen?  Make sure you tell marketing what kind of contact info you want, if you can add any questions to landing pages, slides or forms that is critical to your lead scoring.
3. Marketing – Make sure that there is a strong nurturing campaign in place.  Sales should only be spending their time on leads that are hot (I didn’t say ‘ready to sign’) but are actively looking for a solution.  If you had them help with designing the campaign, you will help them by delivering better leads.  If you have a killer nurturing campaign, you will constantly be farming your house list and you will definitely improve your status with the sales team.
4. Sales – stop trying to teach marketing how to do lead gen.  If you are so interested and know so much, get a job in marketing.  You should focus on how to close business and make your quota.  If you have helped to guide the campaign you should be getting leads that you can work.  With the focus moving more towards ROI vs. branding, marketing teams are more focused on lead generation efforts.  Let them do their job and you do yours.  Today I actually heard a sales person say, “Marketing should focus on solving the business need, not marketing the product.”  Okay, I could go on and on about this (maybe another time) but the point I want to make right now is both are correct.  You need to have both, how to solve the business need and how to market your product outlined in your marketing plan.
5. Marketing – Listen to sales.  Listen to what they want.  I’m not saying that you have to do everything they suggest but listen to them and try to figure out a way to meet their needs.  The more they are happy with the leads they get, and the more leads that go into the pipeline, the better your ROI will be on your campaigns.  Sounds like a win-win doesn’t it?
6. Sales – Talk to marketing and tell them what kind of sales support you need.  Is it collateral?  Tell them what would be useful and the message that you see as being the most helpful to you.  Work within your sales team to define a toolbox and then communicate your needs to marketing.  They will create it for you!  You will get everything you need.
7. Marketing – Market yourselves!  Present what you are doing to sales…to the entire company! Let them know!  Just as you are trying to let your targets know who you are, get them to trust you and recognize you as the leader, so should you be targeting the people that work in your organization.  Do you read Dilbert?  Is the marketing department portrayed as the place you go once you’ve been demoted?  The place where no one works?  Is this true?  Of course not!  One of the reasons that you are not respected by sales is because they feel that you are disconnected.  That you are just playing all day and you aren’t really trying to get them what they need.  Show them that they are wrong; show them that you are doing everything you can (with their help).  Again you will be helping them but mostly helping yourselves.

So, who’s truth is the true truth?  Neither.  Sales needs marketing, how else would the world know about your product/service?  Marketing needs sales, how many marketers do you know want to woo the client.  Stop fighting and help each other.  Together you can improve ROI on your marketing spend and for sales, improve the number of qualified leads that come through…and your commission.

One final word:  I attended the webinar on October 8th.  I was told I would receive the white paper for attending.  As of today, October 17th, I still have not received it.  I did receive however, an email from Genius.com on October 14th.  Here was the first line of this email to me, “I just left you a voice mail and wanted to follow-up via e-mail as well. Thank you our webinar around the topic of  ”Sales and Marketing Aligning for Better Lead Generation .”  I trust you found the infomation both interesting and relevant.”  This is not a typo.  I copied and pasted it in this posting.  Not only are there grammar and spelling errors, but they say, “…around the topic of…”  and didn’t even reference the name of the actual event I attended.  I hope Genius.com is not passing on these best practices in lead generation to their clients!

Tags: b-to-b, B2B, lead generation, marketing, marketing integration, multi-channel, sales

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under B2B, Methodology, lead generation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.