During the early stages of inbound marketing and marketing automation implementation in the business-to-business space, sales were left somewhat ‘out in the cold’. Marketing were gathering huge amounts of information and very little of it was being passed over to the sales team with the lead’s contact details. There was then another shift whereby marketing were providing every piece of information on each lead to the sales team – ultimately overwhelming them.

More than 40% of marketing materials are not used by sales teams[i]

B2B salespeople have a clear objective… pick up the phone and make sales – that’s it. This is what they are best at, and it’s also the reason an organisation employs them. They turn leads into customers and generate revenue for the business. Without the first-hand knowledge of a lead, or the relevant information from marketing, sales will struggle to engage with a lead and convert them. However, too much information from the marketing team and the salesperson will find themselves trawling through pages of data and reading content that the lead engaged with – therefore keeping them away from the phones and wasting their time.

How much is just enough?

The best way to solve this issue is to create a handover pack template. This will be a simple two-page document which includes standard information on the lead such as name and contact details etc. It should also include additional behavioural information such as the content downloaded and the webpages they visited. Ensuring that marketing complete all of the required fields on this document before it’s sent to the salesperson will ensure that all the necessary information has been provided – but not too much.

The direct benefit to implementing this handover pack is that the sales team will be able to rapidly review all the background information they need on each lead then process this and make a call to them.

Handover pack creation

The ideal way to create a handover pack template from scratch is to arrange a meeting between sales and marketing and ask each side to agree on the vital data that’s needed. What do sales need to know, and what information can marketing actually provide? By coming to an agreement on the criteria, the two-page template document can then be created.

 

To find out more about marketing empowering sales and turning more of your leads into customers,

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