It seems that sales and marketing are always on each other’s backs about something. This tension is so common, it’s starting to seem a bit…cliché.
Sales wants more qualified leads at a lower price. Marketing wants sales to follow up on the leads they generate.
Why can’t everyone get along?
Typically this animosity comes from a misalignment of Marketing and Sales’ communication surrounding lead management. It’s key to defeat lead management confusion — and to do it both teams must work together to communicate, market, and just work together to close leads.
You see, the most effective sales processes utilize both sales and marketing from start to finish. This not only helps to build team morale, but it also allows the teams to collaborate and work towards the full integration of sales and marketing (also known as Smarketing).
Lead management confusion can bring any sales process to a screeching halt — or keep it from leaving the station in the first place. By capturing leads into an online lead generation system, nurturing them with continued engagements, and passing them on to a lead management system, your team will be well on their way to beating lead management confusion.
Capture online leads with a central tool
We use HubSpot’s marketing automation tools for our marketing and our clients’ marketing to capture and market to web-generated leads. When selecting a lead generation and marketing system, it is important that the tool is central to your team, effective in capturing lead information, and has powerful features for marketing to the leads it generates.
With HubSpot we receive email notifications with each content offer conversion on our website, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we reach out the same day. HubSpot allows us to use marketing automation tools which engage leads and nurture them down our sales funnel. This period of time takes pressure off sales and only notifies them when a lead is evaluated as marketing or sales qualified.
The result: sales only sees the best, most qualified leads.
Pass leads to a lead management tool
Generating and nurturing leads is great, but we all know that if you don’t follow-up on some leads, you’ll never hear from them. There’s just no replacement for personal communication.
But we are human. We forget, we communicate poorly, and although we’re great at what we do we can always use help keeping on track.
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are fantastic customer and lead management systems. Using a CRM like Nimble, you can rest assured that your leads will not be forgotten. A CRM gives the lead management process some transparency, and helps to prevent gaps or fall-through in your sales process.
We find that lead management confusion occurs most often when there is broken communication between sales and marketing. The best way to beat lead management confusion is to equip sales and marketing with the tools that best draw them together and unify them as one central team.
Ultimately, the key is to bring about change in your organization that will refine your marketing strategy, grow the business, and boost revenue. Using inbound marketing, all of this can be accomplished. Download our free guide below to learn more.