Marketing to Sales Handoff?

Marketing Department Goals
(1 to 5 with 5 being the most important)

To Raise Awareness
1 – 0%
2 – 5%
3 – 15%
4 – 38%
5 – 40%

To serve as voice of the company
1 – 2%
2 – 9%
3 – 25%
4 – 34%
5 – 31%

To drive qualified Leads
1 – 1%
2 – 2%
3 – 12%
4 – 33%
5 – 52%

To nurture leads
1 – 3%
2 – 11%
3 – 27%
4 – 38%
5 – 21%

Source: B to B Analytics Survey and the Web Analytics Association 2010

I think the big question here is; are you a Marketing oriented person with sales tendencies or a Sales oriented person with marketing tendencies?

Marketing to Sales handoff
58% - Involvement never ends but the type and volume of engagement changes
16% - Once leads have been qualified and scored
10% - Once a program has started to generate leads
8% - Once a lead has been nurtured and shows strong buying intent
5% - Once the ad, tactic or program goes live or has been deployed
3% - Once a sale has been completed
1% - Other

* Source: 2010 Outlook: Marketing Priorities and Plans

The age old question of when a marketing department should hand off the lead to the sales department has not ended with the advent of Social Media Marketing but rather intensified it


Larson Notes & Satire: So are you the sales guy or the marketing person? Whichever way you lean is how you will probable rate the above functions. As an owner, marketing never stops but serves as a function of being in qualified sales leads to the sales department for them to close on. The two are not separate but must be joined at the hip to propel the companies close deals. If you are letting them operate in a dysfunctional way you are losing valuable synergy. My feeling is that marketing should be handing off the lead to sales ASAP so they can do what they do best, being the prospect into the fold as a customer. In every business there is a sales cycle. The sooner you get the prospect into that cycle the better. Another key point here is that Marketing’s function is not to close sales but to get the word out and make awareness. Marketing can still push out to a prospect even while sales is working on them, but there needs to be a hand off. There can be 3 parts to your marketing attach, presales marketing, during-sales marketing and after-sales marketing.

If your marketing people and your sales people are talking to each other they can complement each other and make life a whole lot easier for each other. If they don’t talk, you got a message nightmare that can be giving out 5 or 6 messages at the same time to the same people. To this I have only 2 words: Good Luck!

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
847-991-0488
howard@larsonassociates.ws
http://www.larsonassociates.ws
http://larsonassociates.blogspot.com

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