You see those marketing guys sitting across the room? You know, the team that sends you unqualified leads that you have to toil over to convert into closed sales? Well, it’s time to get cozy. Marketing and Sales have to learn to not only coexist but collaborate.
Why? Because buying group trends force marketing and sales teams to work closer together more than ever before.
You have seen the recent business surveys. Prospects aren’t engaging Sales until 57% of the way through their buying process. This is long after most stakeholders have become entrenched in their own positions on your product. You now have to rely on Marketing to start delivering the right messages and winning over stakeholders before you even know the prospect exists. The main way you will know who you’re dealing with and what they need before you even meet is through the data coming from Marketing.
Unfortunately, for the majority of marketing and sales teams, the degree of coordination and transparency this requires is, to be honest, out of reach. We struggle to share lead data in a timely manner. Harder still is all the data it takes to make a seamless, well-informed handoff from Marketing to Sales.
In his recent post, “Why Sales Pros Just Don’t See the Value of Educating Their Buyers,” Jamie Shanks talks about how this situation can and must change:
“[M]arketing needs to unlock Pandora’s Box. They need to provide the sales team with the tools and technology to be able to see in real time the content consumption story of their buyers. Sales needs to understand that there’s a direct relationship between them sharing content, leading to the buyer wanting to have a sales conversation.”
Numbers around digital downloads, page views, clicks—all of these form what Shanks calls the buyer’s content consumption story, and it’s absolutely essential to helping Sales hit the ground running with that buyer.
To some degree, this is a silo problem, the tendency that departments have of hoarding data that could be invaluable to other departments. In this regard, Marketing can start making immediate progress simply by making the tools that capture this data accessible to Sales. However, if your organization doesn’t yet have the tools to capture this data in the first place, obtaining these tools has to be Job #1.
Finally, there has to be a change of mindset between Marketing and Sales. The more integrated marketing and sales teams become, the more they will be empowered to maximize their leads. So get as close as you can with Marketing—and watch as the quality of your leads—and rates at which they close—increase.
To learn how Consensus captures the buyer’s content consumption story in unprecedented clarity, click on the orange “Watch Demo” button below.
