One Dozen Ways You Can Help Your Marketing Team Generate More Leads for More New Business

One of the criticisms often mentioned by agency owners and sales teams about marketing is that the marketing team just isn’t delivering enough sales-qualified leads. Marketers aren’t silent, however, as they complain that the sales team is ignoring or dropping the leads that the marketing team has developed.

I believe that instead of an “us versus them” business development culture, what’s missing is collaboration and agreement on goals, responsibilities, measurability, and accountability of all the actors involved in revenue growth.

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A good way to start this collaboration is for your sales team to provide your marketing team with insights and observations, coupled with discussions, about the situations, issues and opportunities they see.

What owners and the sales team should be doing for the marketing department

Here’s a list of 12 action items that the owners and sales team can do for, or with, the marketing department

  1. Help pinpoint or define quantifiable leads and sales goals for the company and the percentage of those goals expected to come from marketing initiatives. (Note – a large percentage of meeting sales goals will come from traditional sales activities like networking).
  2. Provide your marketers with a “feet on the street” assessment of what your firm’s competitors are doing right and wrong with their branding, content marketing and lead generation activities.
  3. Give your perspectives, information, insights and observations on trends affecting new business opportunities for the company in general, and for the specific industries or niches the company serves.
  4. Identify critical issues, pains and hot buttons affecting clients and prospects that can be of use in content ranging from sales collateral to blog posts.
  5. Bring any pending standards, regulation, legislation, case law, or executive orders affecting new business opportunities to the table, and discuss how the agency might capitalize on them for new business purposes.
  6. If you see content such as articles, blog posts, white papers, eBooks and presentations from external subject matter experts about trends, issues or changes affecting new business opportunities, make sure you pass them along to your marketers.
  7. Give your marketers an honest assessment of what marketing initiatives have and haven’t worked to increase the agency’s visibility and get more leads and new business.
  8. Share sales objections you’re hearing from prospects and clients as they may represent critical opportunities for content marketing ideas.
  9. Share your stories about how the sales team secured and closed a lead outside of marketing initiatives to identify ways that marketing could be useful in helping close more leads, faster.
  10. Identify opportunities for developing case studies to showcase agency results.
  11. Give the marketing team your perspective on critical competitive differentiators of the agency.
  12. Get the marketing and sales team on the same age when it comes to what constitutes a lead, a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead.

Next steps

If your firm is looking for guidance on how to align marketing and sales efforts, we can help with our suite of sales consulting and sales enablement services. Or, if you need assistance for developing a content strategy aligned with your buyer’s journey, we’re only a phone call away.

Click here to connect with me via email, or give me a call at (585) 750-8258.

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Alan Vitberg

Alan Vitberg
Alan Vitberg is executive director of LeadG2’s professional services team. You can reach him at (585) 750-8258 or via email at alanvitberg (at) csscenter (dot) com. Visit LeadG2’s website for its marketing and sales blog.

Alan Vitberg

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