I presented the Bottom-Up Marketing webcast last week for Target Marketing Mag and following the event found the same question had been submitted by a number of attendees. The question? How does a marketer get sales to follow up with leads? I came away feeling I had done a poor job of helping the audience to understand, it’s not, “how do you get sales to do what you want?” it’s “how do you give sales something they want to work with?”
The premise of bottom-up marketing is that we marketers are only half the equation. Yes, our skills and expertise are critical to the campaign design and architecting process, but for the sales funnel requiring a closer, we must turn to the experience of our sales and CSR teams to understand the traditional process our business has used for converting leads to customers.
When a marketer asks the question, “How do I make sales do their job?” I immediately know this is an organization where marketing and closers are firmly pitted against one another and conversations and collaboration are a thing of the past — if they ever were. It’s a terrible question and says much about your how you see yourself and your department in the sales funnel. If this is you, prepare yourself for a chewing out.
Resolution of discourse comes only where there is conversation and compromise.
Identifying prospects and warming leads without the input of the very persons who close those leads is like writing a script without consideration for the audience. Oh sure, you can do it, but how many people from your audience will buy a ticket to your next event if you write only for yourself? We marketers know better than to act as an audience (focus group) of one. Our job is to develop content for our mass audience. The people within our business with the best understanding of our audience is the closing team. Our closers, be that sales, CSRs, or another department, has a front-row seat to what our customers need, want, and require and we would do well to pay attention.
Stop wondering how you can manipulate your sales team and start involving them.
At the very beginning — when you are brainstorming your next campaign — start at the bottom (of the sales funnel) by meeting with your closers to get their insight on crafting a digitized version of their warming process. You will not be able to duplicate all of their functions, and as people who bring unique personalities to the closing process, you shouldn’t try. Ask your sales team about resources and processes and contribute where you can. Move the easy rocks — use nurture emails to provide instantaneous responses for form completions while setting the stage for a sales call, provide links to videos, enroll them in a demo — do the rote work that capitalizes on your automated-campaign processes.
Our closers excel in so many areas we marketers guess, struggle, test, and analyze — all in a never-ending effort to learn more about:
Finding prospects
Distilling prospects to leads
Determining which leads are qualified leads
Nurturing leads through the sales funnel
Converting leads to customers
Take the short cut. Your closers already have a great deal of this insight and are usually willing to impart at least some of it to you.
Look at it from their point of view: If you were in sales and the marketing department was delivering you qualified/hot leads, wouldn’t you rather process those than start anew with a cold call? Of course you would. So do they.
So how do you make the closers do their job and close the sales you give them? Invite them to participate — from the bottom up.
