Aligning Marketing for Sales Conversions, Stop Lead Leakage
The attached image is taken from ‘State of Sales 3rd edition’, a Salesforce Research that surveyed over 2900 global sales professionals and leaders in 2018. Sales professionals tend to be high performers if they are able to work in hand-in-hand with the marketing team.
Sales and Marketing teams often use different performance measurement metrics that may not be aligned to the larger strategic interest of the organization as a whole. Sales professionals are mostly measured on conversion and revenue from new deals/customers while marketing is measured on the leads generated. There tends to be an inherent conflict in the definition of input ‘leads’ which allows for the classic game of passing the buck between these teams.
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Sales and Marketing Teams Need to have a Symbiotic Relationship
While this is harped upon theoretically in various fora, the on-ground reality is vastly different for a majority of the firms. Enquiries need to pass through a set of qualifying criteria aligned to the organization’s strategic business plan to qualify as ‘marketing qualified leads’ (MQLs). This might happen in an ideal world, but, in reality, majority of the enquiries received are passed off as MQLs to boost the performance metrics of the marketing team. Since sales team are measured on conversion, only a subset MQLs are accepted by Sales team as ‘sales qualified leads’ (SQLs) and actioned upon.
In the best-case scenario where both Sales and Marketing teams are working cohesively aligned to the firm’s strategic goals, there should be negligible difference between MQLs and SQLs. Any MQLs not qualifying as SQLs need to have a strategic reason which needs to be communicated to all concerned stakeholders so that future deviations can be minimized. Sales team members tend to have the most insights into the customers’ organizations and need to feedback their inputs as ‘voice of customer’ for planning and implementation of marketing strategy.
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