How do 3rd party vendors help with Sales & Marketing integration?

In one of the earlier posts, my colleague, Abhijit touched upon the need for integration between the Sales & Marketing functions within Tech companies. While the post outlined the need for it and the mechanism to achieve that integration, I would like to touch upon how a 3rd party Inside Sales vendor can very easily speed up the process.

Having worked with multiple tech companies over the years, I have noticed that there is an almost cynical attitude sales has towards marketing leads. The attitude stems from the fact that given the constraints marketing faces, they end up passing a large number of leads (primarily from Email Marketing, Web Marketing and similar channels) that are a complete waste of time for Sales managers.

Over a period of time, this leads to genuine inquiries being thrown out by Sales managers just because there is no trust in the Lead Generation engine created by Marketing. Invariably, Sales managers end up depending on themselves to generate the leads they need and when they leave take all intelligence & contact data with them. So how does a third party vendor help with these issues.

In most of the successful campaigns we have executed for customers, I have noted that when our teams are used to qualify leads from all the components of the lead generation engine (Email Marketing, Events, Web Marketing, etc) and pass on only “Sales-ready” leads to the sales teams the effectiveness of the programs (number of opportunities identified to overall number of leads generated) is much higher than campaigns where we are used to only to book time-slots.

However, it is critical that the “Sales-readiness” be clearly defined by the Sales team before the start of the engagement. We recommend that customers use a BANT (Budget-Authority-Need-Timeframe) based scoring model to arrive at the “Sales-readiness” of a lead. Once this is done, the 3rd Party vendor acts like glue between the Sales & Marketing functions. Marketing gets visibility into the Sales process and Sales starts believing in Marketing leads and spends time following up only on genuine opportunities.

Milind Katti
COO, QEDbaton

What do you think are the top reasons that people attend events?

In a recent survey we conducted; B2B Events & Tradeshows was rated as a critical activity by majority of participants. However, in the same survey, respondents indicated that very few specialized resources are dedicated to this activity even though approximately 15% of the Sales & Marketing budget is allocated to the activity. Given the importance that an events strategy plays to the overall Marketing strategy it got me wondering; How does one get the best return on the investment from an event, what determines Business Value?

Is it gaining new sales leads, finding new suppliers, partners & product alliances? How about learning how to market your product to your target market better than your competitors?

I found that if prospecting is the primary objective from an event, then it may deliver less than desirable results. Events are an expensive way to prospect as the cost per lead figures are invariably on the higher side. Traditionally telemarketing & email marketing and other such marketing activities are better channels to prospect.

We have found that events are an ideal tactic for nurturing our prospects and moving them through the sales cycle. These prospects are typically either our existing customers or prospective customers who have responded to campaigns in the past. They have also expressed some interest in what we are propositioning.

Events and trade shows offer prime opportunities for networking and we have to make an effort to make new contacts and get the word out about our company. The trade show is also a very good source of information on both prospects and competitors. However a significant amount of effort needs to go into determining what concerns they have about their future.

What do you think are the top reasons that people attend events?

Hari Raghunathan
Head Marketing, QEDbaton

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