Was with someone on my sales team.
Now I have heard about the age-old battle between sales and marketing. That he-said she-said BS (to put it bluntly). They aren’t calling the leads we gave them, they’re giving us crappy leads…blah blah blah. Truth is we need each other more than we realize.
As a marketer, I am not typically on the phone making calls into the leads I am generating or the leads that come in through our website. I have no idea what that conversation looks and sounds like.
Unless I ask.
We have reports and analytics and we can see what’s converting the best, what the job titles are of the people that are purchasing and even what the journey looks like of a ‘hot’ lead on our website. But that’s all we know. We are missing the relationship piece. At what point in time do sales gain the trust? When does the person actually pick up the phone, respond to an email or schedule a meeting and actually show up? That’s the stuff I want to know. That’s the stuff that fuels the best ideas and decisions when it comes to lead generation and content development.
Talk to your sales team
And I don’t mean the water cooler chit chat. Schedule meetings with them weekly or monthly and ask how things are going. What deals are in the pipeline? What did they recently close or lose? What happened in both cases? Where are they getting ‘stuck’? Is there any content you can produce that would help them? Is there any content that you produced that they think just plain stinks?
Simply asking sales what you can do to help support them goes a long way. We have other things to do but a majority of our responsibilities is to support the brand and that includes not only building a product people want to buy but finding the people that want to buy it.
Have you asked your sales team what you can do for them lately? Why not ask today?
Don’t immediately neglect that water cooler chit chat, Christina. That can go a long way to relationship building — that is, if the boss is sincere in being the employee’s friend and confidante and not just the boss.
There’s a reason I attended a coworker’s wedding, for instance; and it’s all because of the water cooler.
Agree completely Ari! I have great conversations when people let their hair down. However, I just want to stress here in this post that you need to have the conversation. I see way too many people still being coached to ‘walk the halls’. You can only learn so much by sitting in your cube crunching numbers. The conversation must happen!