The marketing team might be busy generating attention and leads for the company but without any formal process for created targeted prospects for sales. On the flip side, the sales team might be "beating the pavement" and banging on the phone but has no regular interaction with the marketing system which results in prospecting in a vacuum.
Stop the madness!
Collaboration between marketing and sales
To create a strong business development process, marketing and sales needs to be in constant communication. Whether you are executing marketing in-house or working with an agency, your marketing team has a lot to learn from your sales people. Your sales people hear all sorts of questions and comments from prospects and customers all the time. Guess where your best inbound marketing material comes from? All those questions and comments.
Set up a regular time when your sales people can talk to your marketing team and share the feedback they are getting from prospects. This strengthens your marketing efforts because now you are staying focused on the topics that are relevant to your target audience.
Your sales team should also be giving feedback to your marketing people so they can learn from wins and losses. Are you sending your sales people awesome leads that are great fits for your company? Are you sending a steady stream of unqualified leads? A mixture? Talk about it and figure out how to fine tune your buyer personas so that everyone is on the same page.
If you can set aside consistent time for your marketing and sales people to collaborate and learn from each other, you will find that the quality of your prospects will increase... which means everybody wins.
Integration of marketing and sales technology
The other piece of the puzzle is the technology that ties your marketing database to your CRM. Your marketing database is where you collect leads. Your CRM is what your sales people track and move prospects through the sales process.
The problem that a lot of organizations have is that they operate with an extreme mindset on one end of the "filtering" spectrum.
At one extreme, their marketing database is set up to only send leads to sales when someone actively fills out a contact form requesting services. It's great when this happens but it's typically not enough to sustain a sales team.
At the other extreme, some systems are set up to send every single lead to the sales CRM. Every time someone downloads an ebook, registers for a webinar, or subscribes to your blog the lead is sent to the CRM where sales people pounce on it and then get discouraged when they find themselves wasting time with a huge list of unqualified leads.
Find a balance. Your marketing database likely contains plenty of qualified leads but you need to filter them correctly in order to know which ones to send to sales.
As you segment your leads, look for attributes that signal that a lead might be ready for contact or that they are a potential fit for your company. Create lists for things like industry, company size, job title, annual revenue, or other factors that align them with your target market.
Even better, implement lead scoring so that you know who is highly engaged and who is not yet ready for contact. When you combine these filters you will soon be able to create a solid list of marketing qualified leads that are ready to be sent to sales.
This means, of course, that your marketing database and CRM need to be integrated. I'm a big fan of HubSpot on the marketing side and my CRM of choice is Membrain. SalesForce is another great CRM that integrates with HubSpot. The point is, choose tools that have the right integrations to make this possible.
A smooth and efficient process for lead generation
Once you have your sales team collaborating with your marketing team, both sides of your business development efforts will be in sync and will get better and better.
Additionally, once you have the right software in place, your sales people will have the right prospects to target and will be set up for success.
