Driving Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and Marketing: Separated By a Common Language

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While more and more companies understand that a response to a campaign or program is not in itself a lead, the question still remains: when is a lead a lead? Marketing often interprets a prospect’s characteristics and actions as those of an ideal buyer, but sales refuses to act, believing the prospect requires more nurturing. In the end, the only way to view reality through a common lens is to develop a language that defines a “lead’s” place along a continuum.

Developing this language can be achieved when sales and marketing begin to understand and speak each other’s language, and build a common taxonomy that describes the state of a prospect. One way is to agree to gather necessary information about a prospect’s attributes. As a group, you must agree whether the information can be collected, and whether specific pieces truly contribute to lead definition (or are just nice-to-knows). This information can then be used to build a scorecard to help determine whether a lead is qualified or not based on a threshold of criteria that must be met. This needed information will be different by product or solution, but often contains the following:

• Demographics: Not only company data such as revenue size, industry, sub-industry, geographical region and employees, but also the prospect’s individual demographics, including title, function, power level and buying role.
• Attributes: What helps to determine the viability of one lead vs. another, such as functional budget allocations, parent vs. subsidiary or competitive situation.
• Activity: Specific activities that a prospect engages in, such as downloading of a white paper, attending a live or online event, or submitting a survey.
• Buying Status: This may include BANT (budget, authority, need, timeline) characteristics, but a critical consideration is agreeing what (if any) of this information can be reliably collected by marketing, and what needs to wait for interactions from either inside or field sales.

Even though sales and marketing often hear each other, that doesn’t mean they’re listening to what the other is saying. In the case of demand creation, without a jointly developed lead taxonomy, good opportunities (and revenue) will almost certainly be lost. Don’t lose ground to your competitors because you find your sales and marketing functions in a war of words; get working on your own lead taxonomy today.