In honor of the end of summer, we cracked open a few Bud Lights on a Friday afternoon to talk about "which comes first, sales or marketing?". In this week's podcast, we conver topics including:
Can companies successfully implement inbound marketing without making changes to their sales process, team or department?
Is your sales team prepared to work inbound leads?
How to involve your sales reps in your inbound marketing strategy
Listen to the episode to hear it all, or read the show notes below.
Read the Show Notes:
Kathleen and I have been participating in a Sales Mastermind group that HubSpot organized for the small number of their partner agencies that have begun to offer sales advice to their marketing services clients. The group has been a fantastic forum for sharing challenges relating to sales and marketing, and one of the themes that has come up again and again is that marketing and sales are often silos, with little collaboration or alignment.
Our involvement in the Mastermind group got us thinking about the connection between sales and marketing and asking the question, can you do inbound marketing without addressing your sales team/process/etc.?
Is Your Sales Team Prepared to Work Inbound Leads?
Recently, we had a prospective client that is considering hiring us to help with their inbound marketing. They have a sales team of about 10 people and are a technology reseller. Many of the leads that they get are from a channel sales arrangement with one of their technology vendors, and they have a lead-to-customer closure rate of 50% on those deals. John Shea, our Director of Inbound Sales Enablement, would say those are "layups" not leads because they are pretty much sure things.
This got us thinking that we should have a conversation with the prospective client early in the sales process to make sure they understand that the inbound leads they get will be different - and require a different sales process - than the channel sales leads they get from their vendor. As a marketing agency, introducing this concept can be risky because it involves making changes in the sales department, which is not typically a department we're talking to at this stage. But, its also a necessary conversation to have in order to set us up for a successful agency-client relationship.
What's the problem? In this case, inbound leads will most likely have a lower lead-to-customer closure rate than the referrals they are currently getting. Under their existing commission structure, this creates a disincentive for their sales team to work inbound leads. Instead, the company needs to consider identifying someone to serve as an inside sales rep and charge them with working the inbound leads and getting them to a point where they can pass them off to the outside sales reps to close.
How to Involve Your Sales Reps in Your Inbound Marketing
Another concern raised by this prospect was that they didn't want to burden their sales reps by requiring them to write content in support of their inbound marketing strategy. We hear this a lot and its a legitimate concern. Your sales people need to be selling, right?
The good news is that there is an easy solution to this problem. Simply create a dedicated email address (such as "content@xyz.com") that your sales team (or other customer-facing employees in your company) can blind copy when they are sending emails that contain information that could be used to create a blog or other piece of content. The emails should go to your marketing department, which can save them in a "content bank" and then draw upon them when they need ideas for new blog posts, ebooks, etc.
We've been using this solution here at Quintain and also with our clients and have come up with an easy way to remind sales people to BCC the content@ address when they are sending emails. It's a mousepad that will sit on their desks and they will see every time they go to hit the "send" button. Check it out...
Want one of these mousepads for yourself? Just tweet us @Quintain using the hashtag #hesaidshesaidpodcast and mention the mousepad and we'll send you one (if you want to order custom mousepads like these for your team, let us know - we can help you with that too!). If YOU create mousepads like these, be sure to tweet us a picture of them.
Which Comes First?
So back to the question... which comes first, marketing or sales? Like most big, strategic questions, the answer is "it depends." In our case, most companies come to us for help with inbound marketing and to try and force them to change their sales organization before working with them on marketing would be disruptive. Nonetheless, its important to identify early on that there might be challenges with sales down the road. Otherwise, when your inbound marketing starts to work and your sales team gets those inbound leads, they are going to think they suck because they are much more difficult to convert than the referrals or channel sales deals they are getting.
This dilemma doesn't just apply to companies doing inbound marketing. Forrester did a study that found only 8% of companies feel their sales and marketing teams are aligned. This highlights the need to elevate the discussion about sales and marketing within the company. Often, when companies get interested in inbound marketing, its because they have a sales problem but don't know it. They think they just aren't getting enough leads and believe that inbound marketing will solve that. Inbound marketing WILL produce more leads, but if those leads aren't nurtured by marketing and worked by sales, they aren't going to convert into customers and this isn't going to solve the company's problem.
This is a difficult challenge to face at the departmental level because department heads (whether in sales or marketing) have a natural incentive to protect their turf. By contrast, C-level execs are uniquely positioned to take a bird's eye view of the whole company and address alignment issues.
Can You Do One Without the Other?
I wonder, if you're not doing inbound marketing, what ARE you doing? Doug Davidoff of Imagine Business Development (a fellow member of our Sales Mastermind group) says "sales consulting without inbound marketing is glorified cold calling" and he actually won't do a sales consulting engagement without some element of inbound marketing because he believes it is so important to create content that can support an effective sales process.
Gone are the days of "I'm going out prospecting to look for clients." These days, your clients are all online. You can work LinkedIn and find prospects or go on Twitter to build relationships. The concept of the salesperson as "hunter" is no longer as relevant as it once was. Today, its more about being a "trapper" and having salespeople who can recognize a good lead "in the wild" - on social media, or when they convert on an offer on your website, etc.
#INBOUND15
As I'm sure you can tell, the topic of sales and marketing alignment has been a hot one around here. In fact, Kathleen will be speaking at HubSpot's INBOUND conference this year as part of the Partner Track, and the topic of her presentation is all about how inbound marketing agencies need to be offering sales consulting services. If you are a HubSpot partner, we'd love to see you there. We'll be sharing exactly what we've done to build a sales consulting offering and including some takeaways that you can use immediately in your agency.
If you haven't already registered, use Kathleen's speaker discount code - SPEAK@INB - to get 25% off your ticket price.
If you ARE going to be at INBOUND, let us know. We'd love to meet you in person. You can request a meeting with our team by clicking here.
Finally, a favor to ask...
Do you enjoy listening to us debate inbound marketing and sales? Want to learn how to improve sales and marketing alignment? Consider subscribing to He Said, She Said on iTunes or Stitcher (the links are up above).
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