Going Beyond the Click-Through: Communicating with Sales

Previously, I posted about how to select the right media partner. Once you've selected the right media partner, the next step is how to track the effectiveness of your marketing programs to drive quality leads for your sales team.

Before discussing how technology and rich media can be used to track your marketing programs, I realized that I was missing one key component. For me, understanding how to communicate and coordinate with my sales teams is instrumental in helping me to track all of my media buys, including ad banners, email campaigns, text links and webinars.

So what are my tips and tricks to improve my sales lead quality while decreasing my sales cycle? Here are my three top tips:

• Provide Campaign Creative to Sales: It’s critical to provide your sales team with a copy of the campaign creative before starting your campaign. This provides the sales team with a reference point and provides them with context when following up on incoming leads. You can then determine which creative truly resonated with your targeted audience.
• Evaluate Quality of Inbound Leads: Understanding the quality of inbound leads is critical for evaluating the true cost per lead. I am in constant communications with my sales reps to determine which incoming lead sources are converting into sales. I can determine the true viability of a media buy as it relates to my marketing objectives.
• Determine Your Sales Cycle: Since I am able to track all my incoming leads against the sales pipeline, I have a sense of the average sales lifecycle. And considering my company’s size, this is critical for providing an accurate sales pipeline.

What are you top tips for communicating with your sales team? Let me know.

Comments

[Don Antonucci]

Communication with sales is such an important component to effective marketing campaigns. Those marketing programs that map closely with sales and the sales pipeline/ cycle can produce positive results. Without solid marketing and sales integration and communication in marketing campaign efforts, many times it's even difficult to know whether and to what extent results were achieved.

Great post. Thanks.

Best,

--Don

Don Antonucci