A conversation between Sales and Marketing
The job of Marketing is to generate awareness and enquiries. The Sales team is charged with closing the deals and bringing in the revenue. Those two teams really need to talk!
Another brilliant idea
There are so many ways to generate interest and enquiries and marketers are never short of ways to spend the marketing budget.
For example, Facebook’s ad formats are many, varied and offer lots of ways to engage with a target market. But just because they generate a lot of leads (‘Yay!’ says Marketing) it doesn’t mean these leads are any good ‘Waste of time!’ says Sales). The only way a marketer truly knows what works—which leads are the good leads—is by talking to the sales team.
Lots of enquiries, job done
As an agency contracting with a challenger brand (ranking second in market share in this sector) we are given a lot of freedom to
- make recommendations
- test and adapt different lead-generation approaches.
When our latest campaign prompted hundreds of direct enquiries via Facebook Messenger, we were delighted.
They answered the call-to-action
Each day the inbox filled up with people responding to the Messenger button call-to-action on our ad. But we started getting nervous because there was no noticeable revenue impact from the campaign.
Something wasn't right. These leads were from named individuals expressing a direct interest in a product. They just weren't converting. We’d been hoping for a pat on the back from the Sales Director but now he was chewing our ears off.
The sales guys’ grumbles got louder by the hour as dealing with these enquiries was taking up a lot of their time. We cancelled the ads within 48 hours and diverted the budget to campaigns we know work.
A learning culture—but only if you talk
You live and learn. But only by talking. We are a small agency, but one with a learning culture, so we try and review and improve wherever possible. Without good and open lines of communication with the client’s in-house sales team this would be impossible.