Sales and Marketing Functions must work in harmony to create and retain lead marketing balance.  When they don’t and work in silos, many departments are impacted; sales, marketing, corporate communications, finance and business operations.  Compare lead marketing to an ecosystem.  An ecosystem is defined as an interactive system established between a group of living creatures and their environment in which they live in.  You are constantly interacting with systems and groups of people.  Just as an ecosystem needs to sustain life, it needs things that are happening above and below the ground that we don’t observe everyday, but it is still a necessity to continue life.  This is where I see the most discord between sales and marketing teams who have accountability for lead marketing.  Often times Sales and Marketing teams are not in the know, and this impacts lead quantity, lead quality, branding, analytics and insight.

For example, does sales/marketing understand how your organization is driving lead quantity? How about lead quality? How do you integrate your brand into campaigns? How do you analyze campaign metrics at the onset of the promotional activity?

The one constant I have seen is that sales always wants more leads and marketing is always wondering what happened to those leads they provided. Now comes the million dollar question, how can sales and marketing move from discord to harmony? I have found that when you increase communication between sales and marketing, discussing lead marketing strategies, execution management and metrics, harmony is produced. Here are four areas where sales and marketing can collaborate together to create harmony between their teams:

Lead Quantity: Ask for ideas on how to drive large quantity of leads into the registration page. Some suggestions: highlight promotion and media plans and goals. Discuss branding partnerships, speakers and topics.

Lead Quality: Engage with sales team to create registration questions, identify desirable attributes. Ask them how they engage with their prospects. An example of four ways I engage with prospects:

1. Registration page
2. Sales acceleration email
3. Event polling
4. Event exit survey

Branding: Ask for opinions on how you can integrate your brand into the campaign. Discuss look and feel of all deliverables including online advertising, emails, landing and reg pages. Consider client and partner logos. Share client thought leadership messaging along with other resources and other links (blogs, archives/libraries, etc.). Discuss what is the next step for your brand and how can you test in a campaign.

Analytics and Insight: Begin analyzing campaign metrics at the onset of the promotional activity. Rely heavily on metrics to help you make swift changes during the campaign in order to maximize performance (i.e., change media, location of registration buttons). Review post event carefully with sales and marketing. Analyze how the audience responded to optimize the next campaign (i.e., subject lines, imagery, topic messaging, and audience). Use metrics to gauge success across your other related marketing programs.

That’s it for now.  I’ll blog some more later.  Now, practice makes perfect.  I have given you several ideas on how to create harmony, now go harmonize with your teams.