At least a couple of decades have passed since the CRM movement really began. It was supposed to make everyone happy, including the Marketing, Sales, and Customer Management departments, as well as the customer! However, I gotta wonder if the gap between marketing & sales has grown even deeper & wider than before.
The truth is, Marketing continues to be ticked off at the Sales team for not closing the leads they have worked so diligently to generate. Sales is just as POed because the leads they receive aren’t nearly as qualified as they should be, resulting in longer sales cycles and all the other issues that come up when trying to close prospects that aren’t ready yet.
In medium and big businesses, it’s a much harder problem to solve. It should (and could) be easy, but it’s not. Call it beaurocracy, politics, ownership, turf, ego, budget, or a myriad of other crapola, it ensures that a big ol’ crevasse remains costing thousands, even millions of dollars. Now THAT’s an expensive opportunity cost!
Fortunately, for a small business, it’s MUCH easier to bridge, or completely eliminate, the gap between marketing and sales. Small businesses tend to be more nimble and can implement ideas/concepts very quickly. One proven way of bridging the gap is to implement a multi-hoop lead management system.
In a multi-hoop lead management system, think of your marketing and sales as creating hoops the prospect needs to jump through in order to progress. Marketing influences the first jump by getting a prospect from a list or some other source to visit your site, register for a white paper or free report, or take some other action. After that is where most business go wrong: Marketing calls it a lead, ships it over to sales, and sales tries to close the sucker! HUGE gap!
What SHOULD happen is that after the initial lead is acquired, it goes through a personalized and automated sequence that educates and follows up with the new lead (without human intervention). The sequence encourages the lead to jump through a second (or third, or fourth, etc.) hoop BEFORE being passed off to the sales team for one-on-one follow up (and probably more hoops in the “sales funnel”).
So, who is responsible for creating the initial lead follow-up sequence? Your marketing and sales directors/managers. Throw ‘em into a room with a sack lunch and lock the door for the day. You’ll be amazed at what they come up with.
Why should you do it? #1) It costs hardly anything to do. #2) It reduces costs. #2) It speeds up sales cycles. #3) Sales reps become harvesters instead of hunters. #4) Sales numbers go up because sales reps are focused on closing deals instead of prospecting, qualifying, and wasting time. #5) Marketing is jazzed because something is finally following up with all the leads they are generating.
Shall I continue? Suffice it to say that it’s a proven model for bridging the gap between marketing & sales.
So, what’s holding you back?
