Too often, sales & marketing blame each other for a lack of results. The leads aren’t good. Sales doesn’t follow up. The excuses go on and on.

If this sounds familiar for your organization, there are things you can start doing right away to mend fences and start on a path towards not only better relations, but far better revenue results.

Call a sales & marketing summit, and don’t let anyone leave the room until the following five things are agreed upon:

Common Lead Definitions: What, exactly, is a qualified lead? What are its characteristics? Get as detailed as you need to be, but make sure both sales & marketing agree on that definition. That way, when leads are delivered to sales, they at minimum meet the basic criteria you’ve both agreed on to make them worth the sales team’s time for follow-up.

Initial Response Time: If the leads are good (and meet the minimum qualified definition), you need a “service agreement” for how quickly those leads will get their first response. If the lead is waiting for something (a white paper, for instance) response time should likely be no longer than 24 business hours. In other cases, 48 hours may be acceptable. Decide what’s right for your organization and customer, get sales management’s buy-in, communicate it clearly to the sales team, and put in place reporting tools to make it super-easy to track this on a daily basis (and send both you and the sales rep alerts when leads fall outside of the service agreement).

Lead Follow-up Steps & Channels: How many times should a lead be attempted before the sales rep gives up and moves on? Should all of those attempts be via phone, or should there be a mix of other channels — email, social media channels, in-person, etc.? If you don’t reach agreement on this critical process, every sales rep will have his or her own idea of what’s right. Some will call once, leave a message, and consider the lead dead. Others will call the poor prospect 20 times. Create a standard with sales not only to ensure leads are thoroughly vetted, but also to ensure sales is moving on to fresher opportunities if there’s nobody at home.

Clear Lead Stages: A lead comes in. The rep starts to attempt a call back. They reach the lead and determine it’s a good prospect, or long-term prospect, or just not qualified. How do they report this information to you? What lead stages have you set up in your lead management or CRM system to not only make it easy and clear how you want sales to categorize their working leads, but also to report to management progress & quality of leads (not to mention improve your lead generation ROI performance moving forward)? Don’t go overboard – 15 lead stages gets way too complicated – but 4-6 stages is reasonable and actionable for most sales environments.

Handing Leads Back to Marketing: According to MarketingSherpa and others, the vast majority of leads generated by B2B organizations in particularly will buy – just not right now. Those leads (once they’re identified as such) need to be passed back to marketing for active nurturing. Make sure there’s a clear process for sales to do just that – ideally with the click of a button.

The presentation was given at the Join the Conversation event in May 2009. All businesses are essentially publishers these days. As both a longtime marketing executive and a publisher, Chase shares his experience as a publisher to these new “publishers”. Included in the presentation are topics heretofore thought of as a publisher’s responsibility but have parallels for businesses of all sizes in their marketing. These include the following:
* Editorial planning
* Breaking News
* Syndication
* Content as marketing
* Metrics & Analytics

This shows how a marketer thinking like a publisher can cost effectively communicate with their community.

Altus partner, Dave Chase, delves into this further in an iMediaConnection.com article titled “Social, meaningful marketing through online video“. It’s worth a read.

Article Highlights:

• Online video is providing new ways to “market with meaning”
• Educational video has been embraced by companies whose product explanations require more than 30 seconds
• The increasing overlap between social media and video is driving increased levels of consumer engagement

Article Highlights:

• Being first isn’t always the best strategy when it comes to emerging media
• Publishers are finding more affordable ways to deliver video content over the cloud
• By only getting charged for the traffic they generate, publishers are less hesitant to join the fray

Go to iMedia to read more about Internet Video Platforms.

The goal is to capture the essence as there’s nearly infinite information on every topic. This is part of a larger endeavor to capture the intellectual property of Altus Alliance. In addition, these how-to’s have been a collaborative effort with Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing. Matt worked for me early in his career and remains one of the best team members I have ever worked with. He’s the kind of professional I like working with. He doesn’t have a PhD…he has a GSD (Gets Stuff Done). All of the topics we cover assume the tight resources of a startup business as opposed to having a large, specialized marketing team. No fluff in these papers.

For a copy of the whitepaper, please fill out the form below. Below the form is the introduction to the whitepaper.

Introduction

Most organizations spend more time and money promoting their websites than they do optimizing existing conversion rates of visitors to their site. Because increasing website conversion is one of the most effective ways to increase profitability at the visitor level, knowing how to measure and improve conversion is vital to success with Internet marketing. This is one of the longest sections due to its importance.

The most common thing we hear from businesses when they are disappointed with their web marketing is something along the lines of “I got people to my website but the campaign just didn’t work”. Let’s draw an analogy with a real world experience. Imagine you had someone helping your business by getting people to step inside your store who expressed an interest in your product. You would think that that person did their job as long as they got people who were relevant to your business to step inside your store. That’s where your job as the business owner begins. Imagine if that shopper who stepped inside wasn’t greeted by anyone, couldn’t find where your merchandise was located, found old merchandise after roaming around, couldn’t find where to check out and when they finally crossed paths with someone all they did was they wanted to talk about how great their store was rather than find out what the shoppers needs were. This is the real world equivalent of the experience visitors to many websites have. It’s no wonder that results for many business websites are abysmal with this kind of experience.

Who is responsible for that shopper’s experience – the person helping get people inside your store or you? Successful businesses that have been around awhile intuitively know the experience they want their customers to have in their real world interactions whether they are an insurance agent or a retailer. They need to pay as much attention to the website experience or they are wasting a lot of money on their marketing and website and missing out on countless opportunities. One business we worked with had a website for five years that didn’t have a big impact on their business. Applying a few of the tips outlined below, they increased sales from their site 129% from March 2008 to March 2009 — a time when most saw big declines in their business.

A website that serves your business should also serve your site visitor and should be like a good butler — butlers anticipate needs and work silently, as a good website should. Unfortunately, most websites aren’t designed with conversion in mind and thus there are missed opportunities whether people find your website independently or you sent them there via your efforts in your place of business or via your advertising.

Remember that once the visitor is at your website, your goal is to convert her — to turn her into a buyer or a lead. In most cases, the conversion you should focus on isn’t an instant sale. The most common activity for website visitors is to do research before they make a purchase online or offline (in local businesses serving local customers, 80% or more of the purchases will take place offline). Thus, you shouldn’t have the expectation that every visit will turn into a sale. If that’s all you design your website around and measure your success against, you’ll be missing out on lots of future opportunity. As mentioned in the Email Newsletter chapter, email marketing to your permission-based list is consistently the highest ROI marketing tactic there is.

Of course, if someone is ready to transact you don’t want any barriers in their way. At the same time, it would be well advised to put 80% of your focus on driving a conversion that is a lower commitment on the part of the visitor. Highlighted below are several ideas that would provide an incentive for a visitor to give you information about themselves. By collecting their email and other relevant information, this opens up a communications channel that will be vital to your success.

The Knight Digital Media Center is a partnership of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Knight Digital Media Center was launched in April 2006 to focus on helping journalists succeed in the rapidly changing media landscape of the 21st Century.

At the heart of addressing the business model challenge for local media is developing a low cost customer acquisition model. Newspapers are only the first to face a crisis – it’s just a matter of time before local TV and radio face a similar crisis. In their situation, many of them rest on an asset that is no longer a major barrier to entry. As the newspapers found out that being the only ones to be able to afford an extremely expensive printing press didn’t provide them an advantage, the ability to broadcast into local markets with terrestial assets no longer provides a competitive barrier to entry for TV and radio.

In all of these cases, these organizations largely have salesforces made up of Farmers, not Hunters that doesn’t position them well to remake themselves with a revenue stream in a new arena.  Altus has been working on the solution to that issue and have seen success with many clients even in the face of a tough economic climate.