Why Your Sales Game Is Lacking & How to Play Ball

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It’s no “breaking news” that many of your buyers are online. And by now, I’m sure you are too – between marketing automation, social media and more, we all are digitally invested. Despite the digital migration of your buyers and internal business teams, there is still a disconnect; online marketing activities aren’t translating into insights that sales can use. Marketing teams generate plenty of clicks, opens, visits and downloads – but too often, these insights and your leads get dumped into a big giant “black hole.” Why is this?

  • Poor online lead profiling, scoring and segmentation, despite your fancy automation systems – do your reps even know what a score of 80 means?
  • Sales reps are wasting valuable time – On average, reps spend 19 minutes and use 7 tools to prepare to contact a SINGLE opportunity. Between conducting research on your CRM, LinkedIn and internal systems and strategizing the best content and offer to present, there has got to be an easier way…

My advice: Product marketers and their sales counterparts must design and execute connected selling paths from lead to revenue – an end-to-end sales play that is easy to understand and act on. A play must answer four questions and be executed across both Marketing and Sales channels:

  • Who are the highest propensity prospects? and for what sales initiative – acquisition, cross-sell, upsell or retention?
  • When should we contact them?
  • How should they be contacted?
  • What content or offer should they be given?

Now, the word connected is important – customer data connects the dots to drive the home run. If Marketing and Sales teams can collect just a little bit of information at each stage of the customer buying journey, they can steadily grow buyer profiles and enable a smarter, more efficient process to answering the who, when, how, and what questions. Connecting the process, so all data is easily visible to the reps, is hard and often falls short of reality.

So here is the lesson: successful sales plays require connecting customer data across the buyer journey.