Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article first appeared August 8, 2007 in the Tatum Marketing blog.

To paraphrase a commonly used truism, a B2B lead generation & development program is only as good as its weakest link. And often that weakest link is the marketing-to-sales handoff.

This is the result of years of building separate marketing and sales organizations that neither communicate with nor respect or understand each other. If you’re going to optimize your marketing programs to generate leads that contribute to sales, you’ve got to break down the wall that separates these two key groups.

You can start that process by taking two steps.

First, clearly define the role and responsibilities of each group as part of the overall revenue-generation process.

In its simplest form, that often looks something like this:

“It is marketing’s job to find and engage qualified prospects and develop them until they are sales ready. It is sales’ job to take the sales ready leads and development them further into customers.“

Once you agree on what “sales ready” looks like, you at least have a clear view of the company’s expectations for each group and the point at which leads pass from one group to the other.

Now you have to develop a process for ensuring that each group performs its job. You can generally accomplish this in two ways:

First, assign measurable objectives and actually measure them. For marketing, these objectives can be as simple as:

• Number of sales-ready leads delivered to sales.
• Number of new prospects added to the pipeline.
• Percentage of leads returned from sales as not sales-ready.
• Amount of revenue derived from marketing-generated leads. (I know there are those of you who are going to protest that marketing can’t be held responsible for revenue. Go ahead. I don’t agree.)

For sales, these objectives might include:

• Follow up on all marketing leads within xx timeframe.
• % of marketing leads closed.
• Maintain predetermined activity level with marketing leads or return them to marketing.

Second, open up communication & visibility between the two groups. Traditionally, marketing has no idea what happens to a lead after it gets passed to sales. Give them this visibility, and give them the right to question sales follow up just as you give sales the right to question the quality of the leads that are handed to them.

Brian Carroll’s recent blog post, 7 Tips to Improve Sales Follow-up & Close More Leads, contains some good ideas about how both teams can contribute to better leads, better follow-up and ultimately, increased sales.

The marketing-to-sales handoff doesn’t have to be your weakest link. At the end of the day, marketing needs to generate better leads and sales needs to do something about it. We’re all in this together.