Marketing Communications Managers Must Know the Sales Quotas!

Posted by James Obermayer on May 21, 2013 8:46:00 AM

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James Obermayer, Executive Director and CEO of the Sales Lead Management Association and President of Sales Leakage Consulting is a regular guest blogger with ViewPoint.

Marketing GunslingerHow can marketing communications managers know how much interest to generate if they don’t know their salespeople’s quotas?

Ask any group of marketing communications managers, exhibits managers or even marketing managers and less than 40%, overall, know the quotas for the sales channel they represent. What world are they living in?

How can these people create demand, create a marketing plan, and create demand generation programs in a vacuum? They spend money, but against what metric? Unfortunately, it’s done every day. Go figure! The result is crocodile tears from Marketing when programs and people are chopped because nobody can answer the question.

Some people think marketers serve at the demand of potential customers. But what about the sales forecast? Don’t marketers ultimately serve at the demand of the people paying their wages, the company they work for, and the sales forecast? Of course they do. One of Marketing’s responsibilities is to create sufficient demand so salespeople can make forecast, the company can pay everyone’s wages, and the stockholders are pleased. That is why marketers are hired.

Marketing people are hired as gunslingers to bring in demand.

They’re hired as gunslingers to bring in results, not readership studies and golden statues from associations that award creativity and imagination, but avoid results.

What did we get for the money we gave you for lead generation?

Accountability and results measurement can be done only through sales lead management. Managing the response is ultimately as important as creating it. When inquiries are created, only half the job is done. Inquiries must be managed, and managing inquiries is a process; a systems-based process with a multi-step route, which if properly thought out and precisely executed will bring huge predictable rewards.

Has anybody solved the lead management riddle and created the “process?” I am not asking about firms and software that solve only part of the riddle. Thousands of companies say they are in the lead management business, but with few exceptions they’re found to be managing thin slices of the process. Managing the whole process requires systems thinking, with a system customized for each company.

CRM is a part. Marketing automation is a part. Qualification in its many forms is a part. Salespeople are a part. Marketing is a part. But to be fully productive, these parts have to come together into a whole “system.” Only a knowledgeable marketing manager can pull together the “parts” to create a workable sales lead management system. Is that you?


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Topics: Marketing & Sales Alignment, Sales Process, Marketing Strategy, Guest Blogs


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