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Sales Training Tips:

Sales Courses: 5 Integration Areas to Bridge the Sales & Marketing Divide

At their 2010 Summit, Sirius Decisions announced an update to the Demand Creation Waterfall concept they had released back in 2005. Their VP of Research, Tony Jaros, asserted that there is too much focus on the initial lead generation stage, and not enough attention paid to the nurturing process. With this in mind, they introduced five integration areas between sales and marketing to help smooth the nurturing process.

Demand Gen Report recently released this article on the subject, and here is their take:

Seed: Focused on the top of the funnel, using traditional and social media to set the stage for demand creation.

Create: Centered on the early stages of net new lead creation, Jaros suggested marketers should also shift their focus from quantity to quality.

Enable: With marketing increasing their role in sales enablement, Jaros pointed out that sales will improve its flow of real opportunities and also improve their ability to source their own leads.

Accelerate: In response to the stalled deals clogging pipelines, lead acceleration is becoming a hot topic as companies look to improve the flow of leads with targeted content and messaging.

Nurture: Because lead nurturing is now required at different phases of the waterfall, Jaros emphasized that care and feeding of leads will remain critical to avoid prospects falling out of the waterfall.

This is a good high-level look at ways to interface sales and marketing with the demand waterfall, but let’s take a more concentrated look at a few of their points.

Traditional & Social Media:

Right off the bat we see the mention of integration of traditional and social media marketing. Let’s talk about integration - most noticeably about the integration of social media marketing with traditional sales & marketing tactics. This is not only where social media provides the most value (when working in tandem with other efforts), but also where you'll receive the highest ROI.

Quality not Quantity:

While it's simple advice for any lead generation campaign, it's worth revisiting from time to time, assessing how you're managing your resources and ensuring your team is onboard with your goals.

Detour Plan:

For leads that may have gone astray in your sales pipeline, you need to nurture them back into the fold. By identifying points where prospects can detour from your sales funnel, you can redraw the sales pipeline to fit that prospect's needs and avoid losing them altogether. A good sales tool for this is Landslide Technologies process-driven CRM and Mobile CRM for the SMB market. Not only does it keep your sales team honest about making sure they execute all of the steps necessary in the sales cycle, but gives your team a roadmap tool for success.

Work Smart, not Hard:

Again, a simple thought, but one that is good to revisit. Go the extra mile in the planning phase, developing a profile for your prospects before you talk to them - it will pay off when you're actually on the phone with them. If you feel you're losing a prospect - don't rush to call them without first taking a step back to consider their needs and develop some sort of plan to reel them in again.

Source: Eric Anderson link

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