For Process Driven Sales – Talk to Marketing

There are still some people (many of them in sales) who view “sales” and “process driven” as mutually exclusive terms. But if you read “Sales 2.0 – Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology” written by Anneke Seley and Brent Holloway, you’ll gain a genuine admiration for what is possible when measurable processes are applied to sales.

Can you imagine being able to accurately project your pipeline 6 months out? What if you knew how to adjust your marketing and sales calling programs to compensate for short term variables so that you still have a reasonable shot of delivering the revenue that Finance is expecting next quarter or the one after that?

Now, for the inside sales juggernauts like Oracle who can invest in both the manpower and the technology to champion the Sales 2.0 approach, it’s one thing. But what about the smaller players who aren’t going to get the manpower, the budget, the training or the software to really jump to the leading edge, how can they (or maybe I should say we) gain some of these advantages?

There is probably a person or two and maybe a whole department close at hand, with the ability to help systematize your sales approach and even better, with a driving desire to help you do it. I’m talking about your Marketing Department. Unlike the One to One world of Sales, your marketing department works with a One to Many approach. They can take content, help you match it up to an audience, manage the mechanism for distributing your message on a consistent basis and – critically- help define a measurement.

Take cold calling for instance. Right now the average sales rep is making one off calls and leaving one off voice mails. Working with your marketing team you can look at your audiences, match up the best voicemail to leave to drive the result you want, pull it into a campaign series, execute on a timely basis and then analyse the results.

How do I know for a fact- that your marketing team can help? Easy. Boxpilot executes process driven sales campaigns with marketing departments all the time and we see the results that this systematic, deliberate process yields when it comes to driving cold leads and then moving them through the nurturing cycle.

Perhaps in your company the Marketing and Sales objectives have not always seemed to be aligned, but if you walk high enough up the ladder, you’ll inevitably find the visionary marketing leader who will only be too happy to get marketing to help the sales group improve their management of the Sales 2.0 process.