Digging around Seth Godin’s blog, I found a post from last year titled “Nine things marketers ought to know about salespeople.” If you’re a sales person, or have both a sales and marketing background like me, you’re probably wondering, ‘how do they not understand?’

Seth’s top 4 are especially good:

1. Selling is hard. Harder than you may ever realize. So, if I seem stressed, cut me some slack.

2. Selling is personal. When I make a promise, I have to keep it. If you force me to break that promise (by changing processes, features or a rollout schedule) I will never forgive you.

3. Selling is interpersonal. I am not moving bits, I’m trying to change people’s minds, one person at a time. So, no, I can’t tell you when the sale will close. No one knows, especially the prospect.

4. I love selling. I particularly love selling great stuff, well marketed. Don’t let me down. Don’t ask me to sell lousy stuff.

Thanks for the intro Seth; so let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. Sales and Marketing should be 1 system. It doesn’t matter what size your business is, if there’s people hiding out on one side of a wall generating leads and throwing them over the fence to the sales team, there is a huge disconnect. That disconnect could be costing you over 10% of your gross revenue.. and don’t even get me started on profitability!

A little more love and a lot more communication on both sides of the equation could mean millions for your organization.

1. Understanding what is working and what is not.

2. Understanding the campaigns well enough in advance that reps can have very relevant conversations with inbound prospects

3. Knowing what leads are ready to buy, which ones will have immediate objections, and which ones will need to be ‘warmed up’ first before an opportunity will even develop. (if a rep doesn’t know this going in, they may be telling a customer who is ready to buy why they should buy – this could equal a lost opportunity! On the flipside, reps that don’t understand the objective of your campaign will disqualify leads quickly that perhaps need some initial engagement from them but you anticipate will not close until further down the line.

Many B2B sales organizations today generate leads through multiple channels and they magically appear in the rep’s CRM system, salesforce.com, ACT! etc; which is great, and ultimately can mean that they are at least not going stale (many B2B leads are 50% less likely to close after 2 business days) but we still have the problem of sales reps not knowing if the lead is ready to buy, ice cold or even what their search term was in many cases. If you want your reps to close the most business at least ensure there is enough information delivered with a lead for them to open with the right questions and the right approach! Give them something to start the conversation off, and finally coach them; I coached my reps to think long and hard about the keyword, and create an opening question that contained an exact phrase match, their incedents of getting shut down dropped to almost nothing!

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