Lead Management Strategy: Why Do 90% of Marketing Materials Go Unused by Sales?

Poor Sales Lead Management Strategy Impacts Marketing and Sales

As a business strategy, it makes sense to have marketing and sales working together. It’s a circular relationship that relies on teamwork to succeed. A typical process?involves a marketing team funded by sales dollars. In turn, the marketing team then creates content, promotions and material for the sales team. The sales team will then disseminate it and relay it in an effective way to consumers, who will ideally give more money to the sales team to continue the cycle. Businesses take this relationship seriously ? in some cases, marketers can spend up to 25 percent of their budget on content marketing alone. So why then do 90 percent of marketing materials provided go unused by the sales team? In short: poor sales lead management strategy.

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Sales File Not Found

A major barrier to sales agents accessing the wealth of marketing content at their disposal is just that ? the amount of content available. According to the International Data Corporation, a global marketing research firm, the number one reason sales agents don?t utilize available marketing content is that they either don?t know how to locate it, or don?t know how to locate exactly what they need. This can be a critical problem for organizations that spend large sums of money generating massive amounts of content without a comprehensive sales lead management strategy that communicates effective ways for the sales team to find it. Imagine all the wasted resources – the more content they generate, the worse off they are! By communicating effective methods of content retrieval with the sales team, management ensures money is not wasted generating stacks of content that will go unused. By streamlining the searching process, agents can utilize more of their time actually selling instead of searching.

Lead Personalization

No matter how much content is created by the marketing department, it’s useless to the sales team unless it fills a specific need for the client. Broad, generalized content is ineffective in engaging and attracting consumers. 90 percent of consumers have found custom, personalized content more useful for their needs, while 78 percent believe that businesses creating custom content are interested in fostering good relationships with their clients. With this in mind, management in the marketing department should be focusing on developing carefully crafted content that will engage consumers on a personal level.

Communicating the Value in Sales Lead Management

The secret to how this can be done lies in the sales lead management strategy. A key component should involve communication between the marketing department and sales team. The sales agents are the ones directly interfacing with the clients. Before even trying to sell, their job is to listen to the needs of the client and figure out how they can utilize their product to meet those specific needs. Sales agents who focus more on scripts and ?making the sale? can lose sight of this fact ? they are there for the benefit of the client, not the other way around. Sales agents who are able to listen and engage with their clients will be able to deliver personalized feedback to the marketing department, who in turn will be able to leverage that information into content that is both attractive and compelling to the potential buyer. Research has shown that 71 percent of buyers who find personal value in a product will buy it, with 68 percent of them willing to pay a higher price than average for it. With these numbers in mind, it is clear that a smaller amount of customized content is what will generate the most sales.

Marketing Matters Inbound?is an inbound marketing firm specializing in online conversions, content?strategy, PPC campaigns and traditional media placement. Our experience in?B2B digital?marketing?and?traditional media?allows us to deliver results through a strategic media mix. We believe in?aligning and merging marketing and sales/operations for optimal return on your marketing investment.