Who is responsible for lead generation?
Is it marketing or sales or both?
You may think the answer is obvious but in many
organisations both parties often regard this as the others responsibility, and
they’re both right. The challenge is to ensure both fully understand the role
and responsibilities of each other.
Typically, there are significant challenges within both
sales and marketing. The marketing function tends to struggle generating a
sufficient volume of qualified leads, due mainly to the funding available, and
the sales function often has little or no funding and is usually left carrying
the burden of prospecting for leads. Good sales people are an expensive
resource and wasting time struggling to get their foot in the door and find
people who want to talk to them, when they should ideally be selling to engaged
and viable prospects, is a costly mistake many organisations make.
Why then are so many sales people making cold calls, sending cold emails and prospecting?
The simple answer is they have no choice.
Most sales organisations have a mantra of increasing
activity, ‘make more calls, send more emails’ and yet the top performing sales
people spend less time prospecting and more time networking and getting
referrals.
B2B marketing is in the midst of significant change and
modernisation to align with how people buy and top performing sales people are
similarly transforming their approach. They leverage their social networks
through LinkedIn and Twitter, and monitor new about accounts. In short, they
practice social selling with intent which, when done well, is practical and
takes up less selling time. Sales ready
leads generated by marketing then help to top up the pipeline.
Marketing and Sales both need to be involved throughout the journey.
The focus within sales is dominated by the immediate and
short-term revenue and quotas to fill, consequently creating a well-crafted,
researched and deliberate lead generation campaign is problematic. To do lead
generation properly requires a dedicated, ongoing commitment which marketing
are best placed to deliver.
Working closely
together, sales should be able to help marketing develop leads that match the
seller’s expectations to sell with the buyer’s expectations to buy. A refined
process of generating marketing qualified leads that are then qualified and
nurtured by internal sales, SDR’s or outsourced teams allows the sales team to
focus on developing relationships and closing new business.
Conclusion
Lead generation is an aspect of both sales and marketing
with the common ultimate goal to generate revenue. Taking into account the
revenue goals and fully collaborating to align messaging, ideal customer
profiles, qualification criteria and lead routing results in an improved
understanding of this shared responsibility. Simply put, treating lead
generation as a shared responsibility to generate revenue, with a full
understanding of who is doing what, will achieve better results.
