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Earlier in the week, I had an interesting phone call with a potential client and when the conversation started turning from how I can help him to how his marketing specialists can help his salespeople, I took a quick pause for processing sake. Fair enough, I processed. I know a bit about that, let's go there.

The issue he is facing is that the head of his region, who we will call Mortimer is a firm believer that salespeople should be responsible for their own top-of-the-funnel lead generation and early-stage nurturing as well as middle to late-stage pull-through and closing. I asked this potential client, who we will call Joey, how he thought that arrangement is impacting new account closing velocity. His response was as expected: "it slows everything down because my sales team is working on too much stuff along the lead nurturing continuum." Then I asked Joey if he had sales enablement tools like CRM, sales content, marketing content, email marketing software, etc and he said yes. Ok, so he has the basics. He even said he has two marketing/sales support specialists. Whoa! Not one, but two.

Now we're talkin'. Two marketing/sales support specialists to work with his sales team. Awesome! Not so fast. The two specialists, at the direction of Mortimer, are there to send the sales team content and manually download purchased leads into the CRM. They don't help with actual inbound lead acquisition, early-stage automated lead nurturing, or any type of overall lead and pipeline management within the CRM. What an absolute waste of resources.

This brings me back to a couple of earlier blog posts I penned about marketing and sales working collaboratively to achieve revenue goal attainment. Turns out Joey read them both but unfortunately has a region head in Mortimer who believes that salespeople don't need sales or marketing support. His comment to Joey was something along the lines of "so you want me to get cold callers for the cold callers?" Archaic thinking? Yes. Uninformed? No.

Mortimer has the information, he simply chooses to not utilize it to make forward-thinking decisions. I'm not quite sure what you would label that but I'm open to ideas. What's the upshot of this all? Don't waste or misuse valuable resources or opportunities to more closely align marketing with sales. They should walk in lock-step, leverage the CRM, content, automation, lead scoring, etc. to ensure the highest likelihood of hitting company revenue goals, and share not only in the mission itself, but also the reward.

Until next time, have a great day, please share this with those you think will find it interesting, leave constructive feedback, and as always, Achieve Greatness.