There’s a chance you’re familiar with the love/hate relationship between Sales and Marketing. Depending on the company, it seems the two teams can be the best of friends or mortal enemies. But at the end of the day, both teams are trying to achieve the same goal: bring in more customers. And what better way to bring in more customers than to improve the Sales team’s close rates?
One would think that a unified goal would lead to teamwork. Sadly, this isn’t always the case. Sales complains about the quality of the leads Marketing is generating, and Marketing fires back that the Sales team can’t close a door! Can’t we all just get along?!
There’s no need to throw anyone under the bus. We’ve put together a few tricks to help your marketing team pitch in to improve Sales’ close rates.
Listen to prospect conversations.
Whether you’re listening to a sales call or sitting in on a chat conversation, direct interaction between the sales staff and prospects is a rich source of information that marketing can use to assist sales. Are there common questions prospects ask that can be easily addressed through a PDF, webpage, or other marketing material? Are multiple sales calls hitting the same objection that should have been addressed earlier in the buyer’s decision making process?
By providing prospects with the right information at the right time, Marketing can provide higher quality leads to Sales. Which brings us to trick #2.
Establish marketing and sales lead qualifiers.
You may already be familiar with the concept of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). If not, the concepts are fairly simple. MQLs are leads that should be marketed to, but have yet to take any action that deserves Sales’ full attention. SQLs should still receive marketing material, but have indicated (in one or more of many ways like downloaded certain offers, visiting specific website pages or actually filling out a contact form etc) that they’re very much ready for direct interaction with the Sales team.
But before you can segment MQLs and SQLs, you’ll want to identify your qualifiers. What makes a lead worthy enough to be handed over to Sales? Here are some possibilities,
-
The lead has self identified itself as being sales qualified by reaching out directly to sales, or expressing interest in being contacted by sales. Someone that requests a product demo, for instance, is considered a SQL.
-
The lead has reached a certain score. Lead scoring can be a great way for establishing a numerical threshold that separates MQLs and SQLs. For example - opening an email may be worth 1 point, clicking through an email may be worth 2 points, submitting a form to download a piece of content may be worth 5 points, but visiting the careers page of the site may be worth (-10) points (note the negative ten - a visit to the career page is often a sign that the visitor is not a prospect, but instead a potential job seeker, and points are taken away from the lead score). Every company is unique, and implementing lead scoring can be a trial and error process until you find something that makes sense.
-
The lead has been nurtured for a certain period of time. Marketing can nurture a lead by providing content over a period of time, such as via a stream of personalized emails. Depending on the results of this nurture stream (such as evidence of clicks or form submissions), the lead may be ready for Sales.
If Sales reaches out to a lead too early in the buyer’s cycle, there’s a chance that the lead will turn away and be lost for good. Invest time in gaining intelligence about your leads by relevantly nurturing them, and your close rates will improve.
Treat Sales as a customer.
Your Sales team is on the front line of prospect interaction, and they likely know what they need to improve their close rates. Speak to your sales staff, and ask what would make their jobs easier. Do they need more supporting documentation? How about an updated sales deck? Maybe they want welcome kits for new prospects or customers.
But remember, Marketing is the expert in communication. Step in, review how Sales is communicating with prospects, and make sure the communication aligns with the greater business strategy. The sales presentation may need an overhaul, and Marketing is the team to help out.
Establish a closed-loop system.
Leads are lost, and business discussions fail - the reasons should be fed right back into the marketing machine so that any insight can influence future marketing developments (remember to feed back the reasons for won opportunities as well - duplicate that success!). And information should not just be qualitative - make sure data is used to measure the success and failures of marketing and sales initiatives.
Marketing + Sales = Team Revenue
Your Marketing and Sales teams should be best buds. Marketing is a critical component in improving the close rates of Sales teams, and Sales can provide some amazing insight to improve marketing strategy.
Increasing your sales' close rates is just one of 20 tips in our 2017 Marketing Checklist. Discover how the other 19 tips can reinvigorate your marketing plan by downloading the checklist today!
