Sales & Marketing Alignment from an Insider

With either dedicated in-house, or outsourced lead generation (market development, sales development) people, did you know you can:

• Accelerate demand
• Nurture and convert more leads
• Increase brand awareness
• Know more about your market
• Build a stable bridge between sales and marketing

Lead Generation Representatives (LGRs) should attend both sales and marketing department weekly meetings or calls to increase communication. In relation to scaling, on average, one LGR can typically support 3-6 sales representatives (SRs). Of course, more strategic tag team endeavors to get into complex enterprise accounts require more collaboration, and in such cases one LGR would be able to support 3 to 4 SRs.

Over the course of a decade and a half, my thinking has evolved about how the right LGR commission plan drives better sales and marketing alignment.

Having an in-house team to which you pay base salaries, and commission based on the number of scheduled or completed appointments, or leads (passed or accepted) is counterproductive, encourages the wrong behaviors, and ultimately wastes time. Instead, you should have a commission plan that syncs with sales revenue goals and pays out a monthly percentage of closed deals. With this, you may need to increase base salary somewhat to retain skilled personnel for long term gains.

While you may receive a higher quantity of leads with the numbers model, the closed deal percentage model will result in higher quality sales-ready leads from follow-up on marketing generated leads (events attended, items downloaded, completed forms, inbound calls, etc.) and outbound efforts.

Your LGRs will:

• Be extremely motivated to reach decision makers in order to build greater value and trust
• Qualify more stringently
• Create more excitement about your products or services and schedule a mutual discovery call or meeting with your SRs to advance the relationship
• Know what happens to all leads
• Provide feedback and insights on which marketing campaigns work best

While maintaining activity volume requirements, LGRs should attend the calls or meetings they arrange for SRs to increase their knowledge base, gain a deeper understanding of customers, qualify better, generally improve, and strengthen the bond with sales. As part of sales onboarding, new SRs should listen in on LGRs calls.

Allow LGRs the freedom to communicate with the SRs with whom they work in order to foster an environment of cooperation and a “we win together” attitude.

Utilize the aforementioned suggestions for:

• Better lead acceptance
• Improved organization morale
• Increased sales productivity
• More deals
• Profitable revenue growth results
• Sales and marketing alignment like never before

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