There are some things in life that are just infuriatingly frustrating. Like, recently it always seems to start raining just as I’m heading out for a run, despite the sun shining all day. I’ve checked the weather forecast, got my shoes on, and just as I step out the door the first droplet falls! But when it comes to business, the thing that really gets me is when your marketing team goes all out and delivers a healthy stream of leads only for these leads to, somehow miraculously, fail to convert.

If that sounds familiar, don’t go and blame your sales team, or your marketing team. More often than not it’s not necessarily the leads themselves, or the people chasing them, that are the problem. It’s sales and marketing alignment, or rather the lack of it. In other words, the two failing to communicate what a good lead looks like, or how the leads are processed once handed over. And that’s good news, because it’s an easy thing to fix.

The Marketing-To-Sales Bridge

When it comes your marketing team handing off new leads, it’s like they need to cross a bridge to reach your sales team. So, you’d want something that’s structurally strong, not a dilapidated rope bridge with half the planks missing (thinking Indy here in The Temple of Doom!). Something that’s solid so it can take whatever you throw at it. But if yours is looking a little flimsy, or struggling with the volume, then there are three places to look.

1. Unaligned lead qualification

It’s marketing that creates the leads in the first place. It could be they’ve crafted a fantastic whitepaper that’s been downloaded hundreds of times. Great, but if the people who are downloading it are students and researchers rather than the budget holder your sales team needs to talk to, not so great. It’s a lot of activity that ends up going nowhere.

Marketing builds the customer types (the personas) a business promotes itself to, but those personas need testing against what the sales team encounters. Sure, marketing will have a whole host of data they can pull and delve into, but what they don’t have is the feedback from the conversations sales has with the supposedly hot leads. And it’s this data that’s one of the most important pieces for marketing to have to be able to adjust the outreach they are doing.

This communication is a bit like the bridge across the Rhine between the two Laufenburgs, on the German and Swiss border. It was built from both sides at once, but the two countries measure height from different seas, the North Sea and the Mediterranean, which provide references that are 27 centimetres apart (who knew sea level changes!). A correction got applied twice and the two halves ended up 54 centimetres out. Both sides were working to a perfectly sensible reference point, just not the same one. Which is exactly what happens when marketing and sales each have their own idea of what a good lead looks like.

2. Missing enablement collateral

Say your two teams are on it and working together so marketing is delivering the right leads that sales needs. Now, all sales needs to do is carry them over the line, but the only thing they have to work with is a generic company presentation and a case study from three years ago.

Marketing rarely ignores collateral. It’s a big part of their remit. If marketing isn’t working closely with sales, marketing will build the collateral for the start of the journey, and struggle to produce the collateral for the end. Sales needs something that continues the conversation the lead has been having so far such as a case study from a business just like theirs, or a comparison chart that weighs you against a competitor. Your marketing team needs to understand which questions and objections come up just before a deal is signed, and then build the collateral around those.

3. The black hole follow-up routine

You’ve managed to get your leads across the bridge, but there’s no one there to greet them. If this happens you could say the sales team have dropped the ball, but that could be a little unfair! More often than not, follow-up timescales haven’t been set, there’s no agreed process for responding, or marketing can’t see in the CRM what’s happened to a lead once it’s been handed over.

It’s an expensive situation to fall into. To understand how expensive, take the amount you spend on marketing in a month, divide it by the number of leads it generates, then multiply it by the number that went nowhere. that’s the marketing spend that’s gone to waste. Oh… and… don’t forget to add the revenue you lost on top.

Keeping The Bridge In Good Repair

A bridge doesn’t stay sound because it was built once. It needs regular maintenance to find those small cracks before they turn into big ones. When it comes to your leads, that inspection is a monthly meeting between sales and marketing, and the good news is, it only needs to last 30 minutes!

It’s a case of bringing the leads that didn’t convert and work out together where each one went missing. Was the wrong person targeted from the start? Was sales lacking the right content to send? Or did no one pick them up for over a week? Every answer will point back to one of the areas above, and you’ll have the evidence you need to help fix it. Plus, I’d bet it will tell you more than understanding why you won the customers you did.

With this meeting comes one very important rule: leave the blame at the door. Pointing fingers will stifle conversation, ideas and progress. The aim is to repair the bridge, get the leads flowing again, not find out who forgot the self-sealing stem bolts(*)

If a monthly meeting seems like a big first step, start smaller. Ask your sales team for the last three leads that went cold and trace what happened to each one. An hour should be enough, and I’d be surprised if it didn’t show you where to start focusing your attention.

When we work in marketing or sales, it’s easy, and perhaps comfortable, to stay on our own side of the river. But the key to success isn’t a flashy marketing campaign, slick sales conversations, or eye-catching branding, but rather just marketing and sales working in harmony with the same goals in mind.

(*) sorry I couldn’t help but squeeze in a Star Trek reference…