Your Sales Team May Be A Single Point of Failure!

Your Sales Team May Be A Single Point of Failure!:from 3forward by Dan Hudson
Companies no longer have the luxury of relying on organic growth to attain their sales and revenue goals in today’s highly competitive environment.  As any sales leader will tell you however, winning these new logos isn’t easy.  To improve their results, progressive sales and marketing organizations recognize that the Internet has forever changed the buying process and they are investing to retool their marketing to sales processes to better align with this new buying dynamic.

Where are Sales and Marketing leaders investing?  Here are a few of the top areas:

• Sales and marketing alignment processes
• Target list development
• Marketing automation/ lead scoring tools
• Content marketing programs
• Search engine optimization
• Social media

After all these worthwhile investments are made to bring your firm a steady stream of highly qualified prospects for your sales team can you now sit back and watch the new sales to roll in?  Maybe not!
When Sales Reps Waste The Company’s Demand Generation Investment
An extremely concerning situation we see in too many companies is when individual sales people apply their own criteria to marketing qualified leads – and in many cases decide not to follow up on the lead at all.   We hear excuses like, “That company is too small;” “I know that firm and they won’t buy from us;” and “I am too busy on other deals;” etc.
The reality is that sales people have a fiduciary responsibility to the company they work for to follow up on each and every lead assigned to them and within an agreed upon timeframe. Their firm has expense associated with the generation of that lead and sales reps don’t have luxury of deciding whether to pursue it or not.  Lead follow up is no different than the expectation that reps will keep their pipelines and CRM system updated and accurate. In the event that the lead is determined to be unqualified sales teams also have the responsibility to return that lead with feedback to marketing for further nurturing.
Marketing, don’t be held hostage by your sales team, you have invested in your firm’s future growth, make sure your sale team does as well!