Introduction
Our clients often complain that their sales reps are feeling overwhelmed and frustrated from a large number of leads that are difficult to close. While having this problem in your organization is not really that bad, (you’d rather have leads than not have leads), it is still important to alleviate it as much as possible. The best way to accomplish this is by not isolating your sales team from your marketing efforts. Instead, they should play an active role in the conversation.
Bad Quality Leads
The first thing to consider is the quality of your leads. Bad leads are frustrating from a sales perspective but they’re usually much cheaper than good quality leads. Hence, you can still have bad leads that are cost-effective from a cost per enrollment perspective. The problem, however, is that a large number of bad quality leads causes disruption in your sales process. Most salespeople would rather make a quick sale than go through hundreds of bad leads to find the golden nugget. It is important that lead quality is addressed but it won’t always be an option if the price is right.
Including The Sales Team In The Marketing Team Conversation And Vice Versa
Education companies and most companies in general often have a very distinct separation between their marketing department and their sales department. These two departments rarely talk to each other at the lower level and in most cases, only the higher-ups observe them both in a top to bottom manner. However, it’s important to understand that sales and marketing are like siblings. They need to interact with each other and give each other feedback in order to improve.
For example, the marketing team can help the sales team by keeping them informed when it comes to lead priority. The sales team usually doesn’t have the same insight into the lead data as the marketing team. Hence, they treat all leads equally. This, of course, is not the ideal approach. Leads come in varying quality and the higher quality, more expensive leads should be treated with extra care. They should be followed up on and every opportunity to close them should be exhausted. The lower quality leads (which are also cheaper) should be treated with less care. However, higher quality leads usually come in smaller amounts than lower quality leads. We can see how this can cause frustration in sales representatives. But if the sales team had better visibility into lead quality and priority, their expectations would be more in line with reality.
The sales team can also help the marketing team. The marketing team has data but what they lack is human interaction and emotional feedback from the customer. At the end of the day, numbers in dashboards and Excel sheets only teach you so much about your customers. Sales reps can explain the human side of the business and show the marketing team how to market certain products. The sales team can also tell the marketing team which subset of leads are successful, which is sometimes difficult to see from data alone.
Conclusion
Division of labor has brought much wealth to the world but it is also important for people of different fields to interact and share their experiences. This is frequently accomplished at the executive level but it is much rarer in the lower hierarchies of an organization. From our experience, we’ve seen how beneficial it can be for everyone when different teams take the opportunity to connect and simply have a conversation from time to time.
