Perfecting the Pass from Marketing to Sales

“Marketing’s got the lead! He signals to sales! Sales is in the end zone! Could this be it? The pass is up and… nope, it’s another incomplete pass.”

Sound familiar? If your business relies on driving and closing leads, this scenario is probably one you’ve experienced far too many times. Passing a lead from marketing to sales can be tricky, and even the most experienced marketing and sales teams can struggle with the handoff.

So who’s to blame? Is marketing lobbing a regular stream of Hail Marys? Is sales cherrypicking and only fielding easy passes? Or is it something else entirely?

Whether it’s football or business, there are a lot of reasons why teams struggle to get results. And, more often than not, it’s not because of a lack of effort. It’s because of a breakdown in communication.

In this article, we’re going to talk about several common problems that plague the marketing-sales handoff and how to get everyone operating from the same playbook. It’ll take some time, effort and more than a little re-training, but in the end, both marketing and sales will be able to take their game to the next level.

Breaking Things Down

As any good football coach knows, the best way to figure out what isn’t working is to start by breaking down your playbook. Let’s start by taking a closer look at a failed pass situation.

For the sake of this example, let’s imagine that you work for aa a B2B company that specializes in cross-product integration. Your business has a variety of out-of-the-box integration options and also offers custom solutions.

Most of your customers have very specific needs and typically find your business by searching online for the names of the two products they want to integrate. With that in mind, you’ve been running paid search ads for a while. You’ve got solid landing pages that match the content of your ads and your campaigns are delivering a good number of leads at an acceptable price point.

The only problem is, most of those leads aren’t turning into sales.

To figure out where things are breaking down, you contact a few recent leads who didn’t sign up with your business to find out why and soon discover that they all tell some variant of the following story:

Your prospective customer, Integrating Isaac, is looking for a way to simplify his company’s accounting by automatically transferring data from Salesforce to QuickBooks. While searching for a solution on Google, he runs into one of your ads:

Your landing page mentions “Easy Salesforce Integration” and “out-of-the-box integration solutions”—which is exactly what Isaac’s looking for, so he pulls out his phone and gives your business a call.

Changing the Game

Now, I can’t speak to the specifics of your marketing-sales handoffs, but this sort of situation is pretty common. The goal of marketing is to get leads to sales at an affordable price, so that’s what they’re held accountable for. The goal of sales is to close leads, so they focus on closing leads.

But, because both teams are focused on their piece of the puzzle, no one takes the time to step back and look at the big picture. That’s a real shame, because to your customers, marketing and sales are all part of the same experience.

If marketing doesn’t set the right expectations and if sales doesn’t meet those expectations, your customers don’t think, “Gee, I bet their marketing and sales teams are a little out of sync. That’s pretty normal, though, so I guess I’ll just see how things shake out.”

1. Make Deliverable Claims

In our example story, your marketing did a great job of producing the right kind of leads, but it didn’t do a very good job of setting the right expectations for your sales process.

Unfortunately, it can be surprisingly easy to fall into this trap of making undeliverable claims.

The job of the marketer is to generate interest in a product. Interest is often measured with metrics such as conversions, leads, traffic and calls…but not sales.

That’s the salesperson’s job, right?

A marketer who finds that certain claims get more clicks and calls may not stop to wonder whether or not those claims are also producing more sales.

2. Change the Product

Changing the product can take a lot of effort and may or may not be feasible, but if people respond a lot better to a certain marketing message or offer, you may have just discovered an unmet market need.

After all, when you first launch a new product or service, you usually have to make some assumptions about who needs it and why.

You start marketing based on these assumptions, but it often turns out that market wants something different than you anticipated. What seemed like the perfect product for one market pain point may end up actually attracting customers with a different problem.

If you can figure out what your market really wants and adjust your offer to meet that need, you can often end up with a much larger and happier customer base.

3. Get on the Phone

Your salespeople know your customers better than just about anyone. In fact, many of the best marketers have some sort of sales experience with your customers.

But what if you don’t have a background in sales?

If you feel more dialed into your statistics than your customers, the simplest solution is to get on the phone and call your customers. Or call up leads that didn’t sign up with you. Or call former customers and find out why they left. Or all three.

The experience of listening to actual customer questions, complaints and expectations can provide you with an enormous amount of insight into what your customers are actually like.

And if you can get in on a few calls with some of your sales people and actually help close a deal, you’ll learn even more about what makes a customer want to close and how to use your marketing to get people ready to close.