Approximately 7 out of 10 marketing professionals prioritize converting leads into customers and 7 out of 10 marketers also believe in their own marketing strategies, according to a 2018 study by HubSpot, but guess what?
Despite all this, salespeople say that they source most of their leads themselves.
Not only is it frustrating – because you and I both know the amount of work and care that goes into securing and converting these leads – but if your sales team thinks the same as the sales folks in the study, it’s likely hurting your ability to secure a higher budget, according to the study.
So today, let’s explore how we can help sales to help us.
Feel free to explore it in video format or read it below:
Start by Understanding Your Sales Team’s Challenges and Needs
If you want to get to a point of salespeople appreciating our marketing leads, it won’t really support us to demonize our sales teams or stay in the frustration. Yes, vent to your fellow marketers, but then be willing to let is go and focus on taking action, because there’s so much we can do, and if we end up working with sales together, all of us are going to benefit from it.
Therefore, I suggest you start by understanding your sales team’s challenges and needs, just like you would with your audience.
And while you do want to talk to your specific sales team to hear their specific needs – because just like audiences, every sales team is different – I dug into that 2018 HubSpot report I mentioned to help you get you started. Their survey had over 6,200 participants from 99 countries, and 55% of them were in B2B.
Top Sales Priorities and Challenges
According to the study, sales’ number one priority is by far to close more deals. That is followed by improving the efficiency of the sales funnel and reducing the length of sales cycles, and then their next priority is social selling.
But while salespeople say that they source most of the leads themselves, they also say that they struggle with prospecting more than anything else. Specifically, according to HubSpot, getting a response from customers is their number one challenge, followed by engaging multiple decision makers at a prospect’s company.
Work Backwards to Understand What Kind of Leads Salespeople Need
Now that you know this, go backwards and figure out what you can do. For example, try to figure out why they’re doing prospecting themselves when you and your team are working so hard to generate leads. Which marketing leads turn into paying customers? Which leads don’t? What’s missing for the sales team in order to close these leads?
Or take the sales funnel efficiency. Where is it leaking? What can you do to improve? What’s prolonging sales cycles more than they need to be? Where do they get stuck? I really encourage you to talk to your sales team about that, because the more data you have, the more strategic decisions that you can make, which means the bigger impact that you can make.
We’re going to talk more about that in a moment, but first, let’s show them that we mean business.
Make a Practical Game Plan to Get Sales the Marketing Leads They Appreciate
Let’s explore some examples of how we can help salespeople based on insights from this study.
Help Salespeople with Their Most Effective Sales Channels
Salespeople told HubSpot their most successful communication channel is the phone, so if that’s the case for your salespeople too, maybe test out the possibility of collecting phone numbers, perhaps by encouraging your audience to get your lead magnet via text.
Alternatively, email is not that far behind when it comes to successful communication channels with prospects, and you’re probably already collecting emails, but check out the third most successful channel:
LinkedIn.
Help Salespeople with B2B Lead Generation on LinkedIn
Now, LinkedIn is definitely behind the other channels. 36% of salespeople said the phone is their most successful communication channel and 30% said email, and only 12% said LinkedIn – but remember, salespeople told HubSpot that social selling is one of their top priorities, and LinkedIn stands out on that front. It also increased from 9% in 2016 to 12% in 2018.
Facebook, on the other hand, got 7% in 2018, and Twitter got zero.
And only 3% said that another social media platform is their most successful sales channels.
I’ll be publishing videos on LinkedIn marketing starting in the next few weeks, so subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the notification bell if you want to be notified when these videos go live, but in the meanwhile, start brainstorming what you can do to make social selling – specifically on LinkedIn – a little easier on your sales team.
Maybe you can get articles and status updates written for them. Maybe you can feature salespeople on your webinars or your LinkedIn company page, or do a Q&A with them on your blog, and then have everybody on the team share it on LinkedIn, to increase their personal brand awareness and start building trust between your salespeople and your audience. Because here’s the thing:
To Get Sales to Appreciate Marketing Leads, You’ll Need to Join Forces with Them
In fact, the HubSpot study suggests you get it in writing. It suggests you create a service level agreement – or SLA for short – where you basically get a contract between marketing and sales that defines your collaboration and aligns your goals, so you’re both working toward the same goals.
About a quarter of study participants – 26% – said they operate under an SLA between marketing and sales, and this is what they’ve seen happen in their companies:
Salespeople actually identify the marketing department as the top lead generator, and companies see a higher ROI in inbound marketing than any other type of sales and marketing collaboration (or, you know, lack of collaboration).
No wonder that marketing teams with SLAs are more likely to get increased budgets.
And if you’re wondering what you’ll do with your increased budget, check out this article, that covers another research about what works for the top performers in B2B content marketing.
