Marketing to sales handover of leads is obsolete
Sales is from Mars, marketing – from Venus!
In B2B Tech, the long-standing protocol for marketing is to generate leads, nurture leads, and hand over to the sales team. With the rise of marketing automation, the taxonomy got sophisticated (MQL, SQL, etc.), but the process remained the same. It’s time to bring down the wall between marketing and sales.
| If we look at the complete buying cycle of a B2B IT procurement, as presented by Gartner – it can be divided into six distinct jobs to be done. Apart from the trigger, Initiated by aspirational reasons or regulatory changes, or a macroeconomic impact like the situation we are facing today. Then each prospect needs to go through four different stages – Problem Identification, Solution Exploration, Requirements Building and Supplier selection. Throughout the stages, they need to validate their assumptions, fine-tune the requirements and most importantly create consensus. Although it looks straightforward – but the actual process is more iterative and nuanced. Especially now – when most of the companies following a rule of thumb of wait and see – the looping back, taking a step forward, and three steps backwards is a common scenario. That’s the reason – the old workflow of handing over the lead from marketing to sales – after nurturing them to become sales qualified lead – is no longer feasible. In the new regular marketing and sales can’t rely on a linear sequential process, especially in the case of ABM – it preferably should be a parallel process. I know to say that is easy and reality is riddled with departmental silos and organisational politics – but we need to break down the wall between two departments to survive. There is no other choice. |
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