There is a lot of talk about Sales and Marketing alignment out there. I’ll let the other more official blogs sugar coat the topic and discuss joint meetings, defining stages, and teamwork. After viewing many Marketo instances and working with a number of teams, I’ve compiled a quick list of the real reasons why Sales doesn’t call the leads Marketing sends over.
Reason #1 You serve up bad leads.
No really. They are bad leads and you are wasting your Sales team’s time. One of the joys of inbound marketing is that we are attracting prospects to our sites to download the content we painstakingly produced. The negative is we also attract junky leads. Thankfully marketing automation makes it easy to control the flow of junk leads into your sales team’s hands. Thing is you need to actually take some time and build in flows to block junk leads.
Data hygiene and data quality should be as integral to your marketing as good copy writing. Take pride in the quality of leads that you send over.
None of these are real leads. They have no place in your MA or CRM.
More over you can’t do a lot of the fun things in Marketo with bad data. Your emails wont get delivered. Building segments and personas for dynamic content gets really hard. Lead routing by geographic territory is impossible if you don’t have up to date location data.
Recommendation: Look into adding a honeypot on your site to prevent spam bots from filling out your forms. Also build in some data management smart campaigns to routinely remove leads with email addresses like test@test.com or FurryKidder@mailinator.com. Look into technology to help augment your lead profile with valuable information such as location, website, revenue, phone number. There are many companies out there that offer easy to install webhooks for data append.
Reason #2 You’ve never shown sales where to find the “good leads”
Are you actually producing MQLs? Does the form on the website go anywhere? Is there an email alert built to let sales know when someone starts a free trial?
These are the basics. But I have seen FAR too many instances of Marketo where the forms on the website go no where and Sales doesn’t know when someone takes action.
Recommendation: Make your Sales team lead views in their CRM for “My MQLs” and let them know that is where they can always find their qualified leads.
Reason #3 You haven’t given your sales team a process on how to manage leads
It needs to be a closed loop system. They have to be able to reject or accept the leads you send over. Make it simple. Everything should flow around the field Lead Status. Teach them to use Lead Status. You give them “lead status = MQL” they either accept it and move it to SAL/SQL or reject the lead as Disqualified or Recycle it to send it back into Nurturing.
