The Marketing and Sales Relationship: A Moebius?
Posted on | March 18, 2011 | 1 Comment
As a follow-up to Elliance’s appearance with DataBanque at the Washington County Manufacturers’ Association meeting recently, we invited Cathy Brennan of DataBanque to be a guest blogger here. Below, she shares an interesting perspective on the “Marketing – Sales Relationship.”
The relationship between Sales and Marketing – especially when it comes to lead handling – has always been tenuous. But it really needs to be strong and collaborative if a company is going to be successful in streamlining its seed-to-lead-to-conversion process.
Moebius Strip by David Benbennick (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons
In fact, sales and marketing should work like a Moebius Strip.
What’s a Moebius Strip? If you don’t know, click here to see a video on YouTube. The person in the video does an excellent job of demonstrating how to make a Moebius Strip and all the fun things you can do with it. (All you need is a wide strip of paper, a Sharpie marker and a pair of scissors.)
The Moebius Strip basically represents infinity, a single continuous-loop plane, one side, one boundary. In contrast, too often Sales & Marketing operate like two gerbils running around two entirely separate, non-intersecting wheels.
This can be corrected by giving special consideration to integrating and smoothing out – kind of like the Moebius strip does — a few simple processes so that they flow easily between marketing and sales in your organization:
- Lead Creation – Marketing
- Database Management – Marketing
- Lead Qualification & Prioritization – Marketing
- Lead Nurturing – Marketing
- Lead Dissemination – Marketing to Sales
- Lead Outcome and Accountability – Sales to Marketing
Managing your marketing database, capturing and qualifying leads, distributing them to the sales force in a timely manner, making sure the follow-up happens, tracking and recording the results: This is the stuff that can seal the deal on your company’s success.
You can follow DataBanque’s Cathy Brennan on Twitter: @cathybass or contact her via LinkedIn.
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May 23rd, 2011 @ 9:27 pm
I’d like to add that not only do both sales and marketing need to agree on the process as noted above, but both teams need to trust each other and the process. For example, the sales team needs to trust that the “qualified leads” are really worth their follow-up efforts and the marketing team needs to feel confident that their efforts are contributing to closed sales. Any process needs buy-in and a full commitment from all parties.