Are your B2B sales and marketing teams costing you money?

Given that the sales and marketing teams within a business are the sole generators of new business and income, the title of this post might surprise you. But it’s true, the sales and marketing teams in your company may be costing you money due to wasted time, effort, and resources.

To add fuel to this fire, a recent survey of B2B marketers by 6Sense found that sales reject 80% of marketing-qualified leads[i].

So, this means that 8 out of 10 leads that marketing generate via their multi-channel activity effectively goes to waste. In addition, as the sales team only accepts 2 leads out of every 10, they are obviously not working at full capacity and generating as much new business as they could be. Ultimately, both these teams are wasting a lot of time and energy generating just a fraction of the revenue they could be. So what’s the solution?

Build a dream team

Instead of approaching sales and marketing teams as two separate entities with different agendas, simply align them using a common objective. Start by creating an open communication pathway between the two parties and ensure that sales creates clear criteria regarding what they call a ‘hot lead’. These criteria can include factors such as location, budget, industry, decision-maker and buying authority.

Now, with this in place, ensure that the marketing team only provides leads that meet all these criteria. If the details of the lead have not been clarified, enable marketing to continue nurturing the lead until the information has been gathered. This process of lead nurturing will not only help to ensure the decision-maker is sales-ready, but will also enable marketing to gather a variety of data which will help sales convert the lead to a customer.

Once the lead nurturing process has taken place, all criteria has been met, and all the information on the lead has been gathered, marketing can then transfer them to the sales team for conversion. At this point, it’s vitally important for marketing to provide all the information it has on the decision-maker in a clear and concise manner. This can take the form of a document or even a pack which includes all the content the lead has digested during their time in the sales funnel. The outcome is that marketing have now given sales the best opportunity to convert the lead to a new customer.

Maintain a dialogue

The real benefit to this process is the open dialogue which can now take place between sales and marketing, and the insight that can be taken from it. For example, if during sales conversations the salespeople begin to see a recurring objection or new pain point, they can report this information back to the marketing team. They, in turn, can amend their marketing messages in order to engage future decision-makers and generate higher-quality leads.

Equally, when marketing nurture a lead, they are able to gather huge amounts of information about a lead which they can pass to sales in order to inform the sales conversation. This process means that valuable information moves fluidly between the two teams and the objective of lead and revenue generation remains the focus of all staff involved.