I'm very excited to have my first guest blog this month from Sales Professional and Coach, Jason Cahill. Jason and I go way back, having gone to elementary and high school together, and I'm thrilled to share his recent article.
My marketing friends have a problem with convincing Sales to read and take action on lead data. They marketers are generating a ton of leads but sales isn’t looking at the data that marketing was able to glean from the lead interaction, they just check out the business and the contact.
I think the solution here is communication and baiting. What do I mean by baiting?
When asking a salesperson to look at the data for the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), you’re effectively saying to them “paint me a picture and you’ll get a mystery prize” there’s no connecting the dots there. The salesperson has to guess ‘what picture do you want, what colours, how big? And the prize, is it good or great or does it suck?’. They become bored, disinterested and ignore the data. Salespeople are supposed to be busy people, so you really have to get to the short ROI quickly for them; effectively what I’m saying is that Marketing has to learn how to sell Sales.
If Marketing said ‘hey here’s the lead, here is specifically what is important to you with this data, because this is how you will make a meaningful connection with this prospect on a cold call or close or whatever.’ This is fundamental Sales, make no mistake, but Marketing has to almost profile their own Salespeople to get them to appreciate and use the data in a targeted way in order to get the ‘prize’ or sale. This is how you ‘bait’ Sales, tie looking at your marketing data to something personally valuable, like commission. Everyone likes money. Finding out how Sales configures their own prospecting lists or opportunities would also be very helpful to Marketing too. You could then figure out how their scoring compares to yours and then work together on what you both find valuable and why, then prioritize the leads.
If you’re just presenting data and throwing it over the fence to Sales, you’re doing your whole job in Marketing (probably well), but only doing half the selling; which you need to do both. Everyone is in Sales whether your title says it or not. You could be pitching an idea or collaboration, whatever, but you are selling something at some point. Happy selling!
Jason Cahill has been in Sales for over 20 years starting at IBM selling laptops and server space. He has progressed in various outside B2B Sales positions from there, usually in tech-related companies like Canon, Toshiba, ADP, Ceridian to name a few. Today, Jay works with companies which are usually led by brilliant people who have an amazing idea, product, or service but have never been in Sales or have had proper Sales coaching. Sales is about communicating effectively, and sometimes the value of your product isn’t always apparent to customers from a spec sheet or marketing collateral. Jay helps businesses make that connection through hands on tactics and strategies.