Navigating the Implications of a Strained Marketing and Sales Team for Lead Conversions

It’s hard for sales and marketing teams today. With the downturn of the market, buyers are pulling out of deals and taking a look at the reutilization of existing tools instead of purchasing new ones. 

Without proper collaboration, handoff, and nurturing processes, the implications of a tough market only increase. It’s time for marketing and sales teams alike to take a look inward and determine if there are optimization opportunities with workflows, data cleansing, and attribution before bringing on another tool. 

So what’s the first step in determining if it’s a process or volume issue? Explore the dynamics of the sales and marketing teams. 

Questions to ask internally of both. 

• What is the current dynamic of the sales and marketing team? 
• Are both teams aligned on goals, processes, and responsibilities?
• Are the challenges that face both teams similar or vastly different?

Once those are established, you can peel back the whys behind them. If both teams aren’t aligned on goals, processes, and responsibilities, chances are your team is strained, and that’s not good for any org. We sometimes see an attribution war against sales and marketing, often tied to pipeline and revenue numbers, and with the constant back and forth, processes often take a back seat to the overall team function.

Process should be priority number one after a mutual North Star is agreed upon. Working backwards from the North Star goal is where the teams are divided by tactics, with a huge emphasis on handoffs and lead conversions. 

Many common challenges are faced when trying to maintain cohesion between marketing and sales departments within the lead handoff and how leads are converted. On one hand, we see teams usually choose one of the following: marketing hands all leads off to sales, or marketing nurtures all inbound leads.

Here’s the problem with both and why strained teams often resort to these tactics: 

• Marketing handing all leads over to sales usually creates a volume issue. Not enough leads for the B/SDRs and therefore AEs. With quotas to meet and pipelines to build, sales often think volume = sales. With sales and marketing being strained and the spigot pouring into the sales queue, marketing often misses out on the learnings of these leads: titles, industries, attribution, positioning, value proposition, etc. Even if that information is being collected (in most cases ineffectively), marketing is trying to keep up with volume and does not have the time to take a step back, analyze, and potentially come up with their next quarter’s campaign based on the lead information. 

• Marketing holding onto the leads and nurturing them has its problems too, and yes, it is often a volume requirement as well. As marketers build nurture and retargeting tracks, they often decide to put leads into these warming streams when there is a backlog of leads. Nurturing a backlog of leads is less than ideal; the leads in many cases receive emails months after the initial touch. Messaging is often not personalized, and relevancy is usually lacking with backlog programs. 

So all to say, neither are great. Ideally, teams are working together to avoid focusing on quantity and rather, focusing on quality.  Here, we dive into how to better foster these teams' relationships.

Once internal conversation and division of the actual leads has been established, it’s time to map out corresponding workflows, processes, and handoffs to carry each lead to the finish line. Naturally, the product type, average sales cycle, and team sizes will dictate the ideal state of this handoff, but regardless of the mechanics around it, marketing should lead with a relevant nurture based on persona with hand raising CTAs in order to secure them over to sales. From there, sales should recognize the warming up marketing has done, and lead their conversations with efficiency and relevance. There’s nothing worse than a conflicting experience for a prospect - it’s often a deal breaker. 

If you are experiencing a lack of lead conversion rates and or a divide between go-to-market teams, we can take a look under your organizational hood, as well as the hood of your tech stack and build a reliable funnel to optimize conversions. 

The longer your strained teams’ impact on lead mismanagement continues, the more compacted the strain. Take control of your processes and align internally to ensure you are doing the most with what you have to work with.