Marketing Lite Industries Like Casting? What happens in industries where there is very little lead generation


marketing and business development – from lead generation to fulfillment is done through the sales team? In some respects, this makes alignment much easier since there’s little risk of a fumbled hand-off from marketing to sales. The challenge often becomes one of time management and usually shorter term sales responsibilities take priority over marketing needs. So, finding the right time and resource balance is often tricky. In addition, even the best sales person may not have all of the skills needed to develop an effective, high quality, marketing campaign. In today’s marketplace, that might require copywriting, design, video production, SEM, and other digital marketing talents that only a rare few sales reps have.


pushing messages that don’t resonate in the market or products / capabilities that don’t play to the company’s strengths, this will also negatively impact the quality of the sales qualified leads.


Missteps here can be really bad and


result in: • Poor overall growth performance • Slower results • Waste (marketing dollars, time, energy)


• Distrust, if not bad blood, between sales and marketing


• Confusion in the market • Bad reputation -- one hand not talking to the other begets the feeling that you don’t have your act together


• Frustration which leads to a higher turnover rate of staff


Misalignment can creep in even the most high-performing companies. Case in point: one of the best-rated physician outsourcing firms. Many hospital departments, emergency rooms for example, do not directly employ their clinical staff. Instead, hospital administrators outsource the staffing and management of these specialty clinical teams to outside companies. It’s big business and a growing trend in hospital management. It’s also very competitive. So, these firms invest heavily in their sales and marketing programs. About 5 years ago, my former ad


agency was fortunate enough to work with one of these firms to provide a broad range of marketing services from strategic marketing planning, PR, social media, tradeshows, direct mail as well as print and digital advertising. It was a good account for us. Tradeshows and conferences were a critical component of their marketing campaigns and a


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good portion of the overall marketing investment centered around event activity. One of the challenges we were given was to improve their lead generation through these events and provide a better return on marketing investment. We realized there were a surprising


low number of leads coming in from the events coupled with a growing frustration from the sales team, since the events were time-consuming and not drawing in the decision makers needed for an effective sales pitch. Leads generated by event activity netted a low number of decision- makers (hospital administrators) but a high level of decision influencers (mid management, nursing management). Events were staffed by sales team representatives to be able to respond quickly to a lead, when needed. Event leads mostly came in the form of a brief face-to-face introduction at the booth followed by an exchange of information, business cards after.


Sales reps were expected to upload the lead information into the company’s CRM system. As it turns out, the reps were only entering leads that were “sales qualified” leads, which met their much stricter criteria. The other less qualified leads never made it into the system and many were lost. Making matters worse was that marketing compensations was tied to lead generation, which was being stymied because leads were not being captured. Sales rep compensation was based on short term performance but wasn’t a true indicator of the quality of the rep.


At the root of the problem was really


false expectations, unrealistic short term sales and poor internal communications. One reason was that the sales reps were


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never trained to share all leads back with the marketing team. They were under the impression that only the sales qualified leads were supposed to uploaded. In addition, and at a deeper level, senior company leadership had unrealistic expectations of the true length of the sales cycle from initial contact to close. This resulted in unrealistic expectations of quote generation, closed deals and ultimately revenue. Compounding the issue was those lost leads which failed to make it into the marketing funnel, meant that fewer qualified leads were being nurtured through the pipeline. But, the fix was not complicated.


Senior management was not intentionally unreasonable. The business had grown through acquisition, not organic growth. So, they didn’t have the data needed to establish aggressive but realistic sales targets. With that new set of target objectives, the sales and marketing team was able to work together to better define lead capture processes to ensure all leads were collected. We were also able to provide onsite event marketing administrative support to free up valuable sales rep time. How do you make sure it doesn’t


happen to you? First, make sure there is open and honest communication between the sales and marketing teams. In addition, don’t develop sales and marketing plans in a vacuum. Make sure each team collaborate on their plans and everyone fully understands their role, processes and expectations. This starts with a set of well-defined strategic objectives. This means that compensation should also be aligned with those objectives and teams are not opposing each other. After every marketing/sales campaign or event, conduct a thorough “post mortem” to determine what’s working and what’s not in order to uncover and solve problems immediately and fine-tune those things that are working well.


June 2019 ❘ 25


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