Still interested in learning more about the way how to do high-impact demand and lead generation that grows your business?
Let´s go ahead. Read Part 3 below.
We talked about the area of conflict between sales and marketing in my last articles (https://www.globalmarcomm.com/?p=2850, https://www.globalmarcomm.com/?p=2937 ).
Sales guys are (or should be, respectively…) experts in how to do professional sales, and marketing people are (or should be, respectively…) experts in their respective areas.
What we can see every day, however, shows that there is more often a deep lack of expertise and missing mutual understanding in each field and especially between both.
Demand and lead generation is an area where marketing can definitely help sales and the company to grow the business if it´s been done in the right way . There is a huge potential that is, hard to believe, still untapped very often as there is no common strategy, no cooperation, no integration, and, finally, not the expertise needed. Marketing programs and campaigns often been developed and executed badly, just following common standards, and it is also some “actionism“ for the sake of doing things just in order to do them, no matter what the quality is and what the outcome is or should be.
So let´s talk about demand and lead generation and the impact on sales in more detail in the next few posts.
To bring it to the point and starting small: what is a lead at all? Here the misunderstanding begins.
Sounds like a simple question but you will hear many different answers on that.
Actually there is not one answer to this question. In fact the question is complex and not trivial as it has very many facets so there is no simple answer, either. You will see over the course of my next posts why this is the case.
There is no “ THE LEAD“ or “A LEAD“.
It is pretty much underestimated in many companies that you can and should plan your leads to be qualified in different ways. You should and you are able to generate leads for different stages of the sales funnel. Also, the leads do not need to be generated just in order to put them into the database. Both marketing and sales need to take the responsibility and ownership to develop the leads down the funnel to an order. At the same time, leads, no matter how qualified they are help the sales people to develop their target accounts. Finally, in order to do all this you need to have the technical infrastructure and a CRM system. More on that later, too.
Still interested? More about generating leads for the different stages of the sales funnel to come soon in part 4….
Josef W. Flossmann, EMEA and Demand Generation Practice Director— Gilbért, Flossmann & Zhang Worldwide, Munich
Contact GF&Z at solutions@globalmarcomm.comm (www.globalmarcomm.com) in order to discuss.