A few years ago, Geoffrey "Sales Machine" James, a BNet blogger with an opinion on selling, smugly and unknowingly illustrated the single most frustrating problem in growing a B2B business. In his September 2009 blog post, "Top Ten Reasons Sales Hates Marketing," James postulated that because of the impossibility of aligning marketing and sales, companies would never achieve their full potential.
You're probably wondering why I'm responding to such a dated perspective. The reason: There are too many people out there with similar views to Geoffrey, and that is a very dangerous thing.
"... my experience tells me that sales professionals aren’t interested in 'getting aligned' with marketing." Geoffrey James
Good sales people know the value of good marketers, and good marketers know the right measure of success is in generating more sales-ready conversations. If this is the case, then where are businesses getting tripped up? Mainstream thinking around demand generation needs to change. It needs to elevate focus on the revenue engine, which at its essence is the co-operative teaming of Marketing and Sales.
James suggests the problem lies with marketing and their inept, underdeveloped sales competency, but this is a huge misconception, and its genesis rests with business executives and their ignorance of what truly powers an effective revenue engine. For the most part, executives focus too narrowly on demand generation, and this results in an imbalanced volume, early-stage lead strategy. With so many resources aimed at prospect acquisition, the marketing well runs dry long before prospects mature into qualified leads and sales teams get frustrated and complain about poor lead quality.
Marketing and sales can and do align. I’ve witnessed it firsthand on many occasions. It works when marketing teams stay engaged with early stage prospects educating and building trust, then handing off to sales only after leads are qualified and projects are imminent. The discipline required for lead nurturing is not only a new concept, but is also a new line item on the budget – something business leaders have a hard time accepting.
Investing in the revenue engine only starts with creating awareness, but unfortunately and quite commonly is also where budget constraints end the investment prematurely. Resources must be applied throughout the entire decision continuum, not just at creating inquiries. Interestingly, the cost of nurturing existing leads is much lower than the cost of acquiring new, early-stage leads. Not only that, but the lead to opportunity conversion rate with nurtured leads is much higher.
One final thought for the “Geoffreys” of the world: It’s easy to play the blame game and point the finger at marketing whenever quarterly quota pressure starts to build. The better approach, however, is to push the pride aside and team up with marketing to unify the effort, demand additional nurturing resources and power an effective revenue engine.
