Latest from the Intellegentia Blog

When I was on territory selling big ticket ERP, Retail, and Supply Chain software solutions, I spent the best part of a 9 month sales cycle digging deep into a prospect's organisation, understanding the motivations, politics and pain points of the various buyers, decision makers, recommenders, and evaluation teams.

As a sales team, we worked to tried and tested sales methodologies, trying to find the ‘fox’ and nurturing all the players with different valuable information to meet their specific needs, countering competitive threats and answering objections.

It was a Solution Sale. It required patience, delivery of information at the right time, a game plan that all the sales and marketing team bought into, and a process to move them towards a decision.

A report published by Software Advice looked at reasons why companies are looking to invest in Marketing Automation Software. It found that a large percentage of businesses in the study were being overwhelmed with managing clients, contacts, and leads (nice problem to have) and are primarily seeking software to improve lead management.

The study looked at small companies in the US with a turnover less than $50 million, a majority of which had small staff teams. So, at least from these findings, it is clear that there is a growing need for lead management at the SME level. If the same research was carried out in the UK, I suspect the results wouldn't be too dissimilar.

But what about organisations that have a 'more defined business development/lead follow up' process? This is particularly true for companies in the technology sector, whose sales cycles tend to be lengthy and complex in nature. Are they any different to small companies with a high volume of leads and customers to process? In our experience, the answer is - NO!

When a lead is ready to buy? How do we know when is the right time to hand them over to sales so that they can close them as a customer?  What happens if that contact isn't quite ready yet?

The key is to have tightly aligned sales and marketing processes and a trusting, open relationship between sales and marketing teams.  This involves executive "encouragement", visionary thinking and a two-way conversation between sales and marketing ... a surprisingly tough call for some companies. 

B2B organisations with tightly aligned sales and marketing operations achieved 24% faster three-year revenue growth, and 27% faster three-year profit growth (SiriusDecisions)

View our webinar to find out more>>

So why do so many companies admit to a difficult relationship between sales and marketing?

I don't believe it's about the people!

It's more about the data systems and processes.. 

What do all growing companies have in common? They all need to add new members to their sales teams in order to achieve their revenue goals and objectives. Onboarding new sales staff, is usually time-consuming, expensive, and not especially easy, and it could take a while before they are achieving quota. Once proficient your experienced sales team know your corporate culture, brand identity, and product lines inside and out, and are capable of using tools like CRM to their full potential.

Onboarding, however usually means an experienced sales person or sales management has to sacrifice time and productivity to help bring the new hire up to speed. But with robust sales enablement program in place, you can reduce time and productivity losses, getting the new personnel up to speed faster and more effectively. 

So what is Sales Enablement?