Tragic Mistakes Your Marketing Department Is Doing To Hurt Sales
Your marketing department is doing things right now that tragically hurt your ability to generate new sales and create customer relationships. It's harsh, but it's the truth. Hopefully you're only guilty of one or two of these tragic marketing mistakes:
Poor lead source tracking - Tools used by marketing aren't always the same tools used by sales. When marketing doesn't pass along where leads come from, sales aren't clear about the right approach. Without lead tracking you're setting sales up for failure, or to completely miss key interests of the prospect.
No system for feedback - What ever happened to those leads sent to sales last month?? When marketing doesn't have a full process handle on lead activity it has no clue to monitor lead quality. Marketing must work for clear lead quality feedback from sales.
Abandoning the relationship too early -- Once a lead is sent to sales, many marketers feels its sales responsible take over the interaction. Since marketing started the relationship is has an obligation to complete follow through, the same obligation sales has with the service department. When marketing doesn't have a system for feedback prospects feel abandoned.
Copy that doesn't reflect key selling points - Marketing does a fine job of researching target buyers, understanding products, but forgets to ask about important objections in the sales cycle. Handle objectives early by placing those points in marketing collateral, but so many marketers fail to do this. Marketing creates unnecessary pressure on sales when they omit key selling points in copy.
Lack of survey results - Often marketing uses direct surveys to understand the concerns of customers, but omits questions that qualify buyers for a specific sale. Sometimes marketer's neglects to share survey results in a format that sales can use to close more business. What marketing intelligence are you neglecting to share with sales people?
Sales not aware of ad context - Leads passed to sales without the context of their acquisition leaves sales people blind in follow up. Marketing must tag, qualify, and position leads for closing sales, not just for a head count. When marketing fails to share context, sales is less effective in closing new opportunities.
All is not lost, there are things that improve marketing ability to generate new sales and create customer relationships by working with the sales department.
The first step to healthy relationships between marketing and sales is to admit there are some obstacles to overcome.? When was the last time these to groups sat down to look at mutual objectives?
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