Innovating Email List Marketing

At most companies, a natural tension exists between the sales and marketing departments. There’s no denying it. It’s like having the Montagues and Capulets working for the same company. Each party desperately believes it is constantly being wronged by the other. Salespeople complain that the leads provided by the marketing group are lousy. On the other hand, marketing people think that the sales group squanders their hard earned leads. Both have valid points.

In this uncertain economy, it’s time to quiver the arrows and sheathe the swords. While your sales team needs to focus on the top line, marketing can do more to mend the rift. Here are a few strategies that will help:

Co-mingle the departments

Does your sales organization occupy one end of the floor while your marketing organization occupies the other? Do the teams see each other only during coffee breaks or mandated company meetings? If the answer to either of these is yes, then it’s time to re-arrange the desks. At one startup I know, they group the salespeople in pods. At least one desk in each pod is set aside for a marketing employee. The big advantage to this is that the marketing team gets to overhear customer and peer conversations. They get to understand what the market is concerned about, what resources the teams need, and why a deal is lost. This rich influx of information makes for better-informed marketing campaigns.

Understand the sales funnel

Every company has a slightly different approach to selling. It’s important that marketers understand these strategies and cater their marketing initiatives accordingly. For instance, sales cycle matters. Marketing for a 7-day closing cycle is very different than marketing for a 6-month closing cycle. Is a free trial or demo required to close the deal? Or is the customer looking for more of a “pilot” program? Each of these programs is useful, but only in the right context. I know of one company that rolled out a fantastic 30-day trial program, only to realize that it took 60 days just to get the software up and going.

Go on sales calls

Whether on the phone or in the field, your marketers will learn a lot by listening in on sales calls. This will help the marketing person understand how salespeople build rapport with the customer, qualify the opportunity and describe the product. They will see for themselves how the customer responds to certain features and offers, what roadblocks they throw up, and how the salesperson resolves these problems. All of this can be used to make the website, marketing campaign, or collateral work harder for the company.

Qualify your leads

Often the marketing department is so happy to have produced enough leads to keep the salespeople busy that it overlooks the quality of the leads. We don’t realize how much work bad leads create for the sales team. At one company I know of, 40% of the leads didn’t pass the sales screen. At 20 minutes per screening call, an average salesperson lost 10 hours a week disqualifying bad leads. In many cases, good sales teams need to ask only 3 to 5 questions to assess the quality of a lead. These questions could include: Am I speaking to the right decision maker? Do you have a budget established? Do you have a time frame or sense of urgency surrounding your goals? Marketers need to understand these questions and incorporate them into the lead generation process. The earlier the marketing department can qualify leads, the more time the sales team can spend selling to likely prospects.

Build sales tools that matter

As marketers, we love to build the really fun, expensive, and cutting edge campaigns – the life size billboards off the freeway, the really cool bus wraps, or the sexy 3D mailers (bottle of wine included). But how many of these sexy campaigns help the sales team win business? Sales organizations are looking for more tangible resources that can assist them with the immediate issue of how to close the deal right now. Here are a few resources that they long for:

• A really good customer-reference program
• An easy-to-use knowledge base that gives them selling points against their toughest competitors
• Good looking collateral in .PDF form that they can easily send to the customers
• Case studies that are current and fit the industry they are selling to
• Sales, rebates and incentives

Deliver any of these items effectively and you will have the sale steam swooning over you–just as Romeo swooned over Juliet. They’re not that much fun to create and maintain, but sales tools like these make a world of difference to the sales process.

It can be hard to be the first one to offer up the olive branch, but if you do, it will be well worth it. There is no reason you can’t play Romeo to sales’ Juliet and offer a great service that directly increases sales and builds a loving relationship between the sales and marketing departments.

Dave Scott is founder and CEO of Marketfish He has served as a senior sales and marketing executive at several Northwest companies.

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