MarketingSherpa Blog

Teamwork is essential to any project involving more than one person. Strong teams are more efficient, reliable and create work of higher quality. It’s impossible for your marketing team to be at its best if it’s not working together.

Teamwork was a recurrent theme in the second day of MarketingSherpa’s B-to-B Demand Generation Summit 2008 in Boston last week. In at least three sessions–and probably more during the previous day–speakers cited increasing cooperation between marketing and sales as fundamental to increasing revenue.

Brian Carroll, CEO, InTouch, laid out a plan for teamwork early in the day. Two takeaways from his presentation:

#1: Co-Define a Lead

Marketing and sales need to co-define what makes a person a sales-ready lead. Having a mutually-agreed-upon definition ensures that marketing is sending sales relevant leads and limiting waste.

“If you have multiple products or services that you’re selling, you may need to have multiple lead definitions,” Brian said.

#2: Close the loop

Sales needs to give marketing feedback on lead performance. This is the only way to refine the process, improve lead quality and maximize efficiency. Brian was not the only speaker to emphasize this point.

In a presentation a few hours later, Dennis Head, Principal, eDemand Leads, also emphasized the importance of teamwork. He noted that equipment can help the lead process but it’s no guarantee of success.

Most lead programs only offer part of the solution, Dennis said. Some might score leads correctly, or route them to the right sales person, but most systems lack a few key steps in the process.

What’s fills the gaps? Teamwork. No amount of software or lead management solutions will be more effective in generating your company revenue than teamwork.

About Adam T. Sutton

Adam T. Sutton, Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa
Adam generates content for MarketingSherpa's Email and Inbound Marketing newsletters. His years of experience in interviewing marketers and conveying their insights has spanned topics such as search marketing, social media marketing, ecommerce, email and more. Adam previously powered the content behind MarketingSherpa's Search and Consumer-marketing newsletters and carries that experience into his new role. Today, in addition to writing articles, he contributes content to the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa blogs, as well as MECLABS webinars, workshops and summits.

Prior to joining MarketingSherpa, Adam was the Managing Editor at the Mequoda group. There he created content and promotions for the company's daily email newsletter and managed its schedule.

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Categories: B To B Ecommerce, Business To Business, Marketing, Sales Lead Generation Tags: lead generation, lead pipeline, office politics, sales, teamwork