Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A sales guy runs up to a marketing lead generation guy and says, “We need to stop buying ‘this campaign!‘ I just got off the phone with ‘this lead,’ and it’s all wrong because we sell ‘X’ and he was really looking for ‘Y.’ We can’t waste my time and your budget on these leads anymore.”

Suddenly, regardless how that campaign or term is really performing, the entire organization has erupted into a massive fire drill to make sure everyone can talk to death the need to keep or drop or change ‘this campaign.’

I came across this video and found it not only very funny, but also extremely relevant to how I’ve seen some Sales and Marketing organizations behave when “Arguing from Ignorance.” Being able to identify good and bad lead sources is a collective effort for both Sales and Marketing. By having a greater collection of objective data and reports on hand, you will yield a more accurate, efficient and productive result.

Please take a moment to watch this from the perspective of Sales addressing Marketing without having the right data in hand.

Now, with the above in mind, does your organization have a complete set of online tracking tools, lead management tools, sales processes and real-time reports in place to allow for the right discoveries and corrections to occur? Here’s a list of questions you should ask your sales and marketing regarding lead generation.

Lead Tracking

• Is Marketing able to track leads back to the original site they were at before visiting your site?
• If prospects enter your website from a campaign, does Marketing use tracking codes and capture them on your web reports and when prospects fill out a form?
• Does Marketing capture other bits of information like searched keywords, landing page(s) visited, calls to action and duration of their visit?

Lead Management Tools

• Has your organization adopted a contact management system (CRM) to capture leads in a consistent and centralized fashion?
• Can Marketing capture leads from your website directly into your CRM?
• Does Marketing or Sales capture the same (or as much) information as you can regardless of the lead source like a phone in, web lead, imported lead, manually entered lead or business card lead?

Sales Processes

• Does your Sales team have access to the tracking data captured about the lead?
• Does your Sales team understand the tracking data captured for each lead in the CRM?
• Can they formulate the right pitch to engage that lead and bridge a conversation to your solution?
• During each contact of the lead, in addition to adding notes, does your sales team ask the right questions to fill in any of the missing demographic or tracking data to complete that lead’s profile?
• Can you record your calls (sales & support) and map those calls to your CRM lead tracking so you can play back the ACTUAL conversation that makes that lead GOOD or BAD?
• Can your Sales team enter information about their prospects from their mobile device while the information is fresh in their mind?
• Does your Sales team stay on top of their lead status throughout the opportunity pipeline, through close, record the value and even properly flag the lead if they churn or the close rescinds?

Lead Reporting and Sales Forecasting

• Do you have an agreement as to what you are going to measure?
• Do you have reports you can check daily, weekly, monthly?
• Do they roll up and include outside information like Google spend, call system, web traffic?
• Do you know what you are willing to spend to acquire a lead? A customer?
• Do you review random recordings Sales has to spot check for quality control? What makes good lead sources good? Bad ones bad? Improve your messaging? Change your product offering?
• Can you make forecasts with your reports and do you compare the deltas between your projections and actual results?
• Do you have full visibility from SPEND to REVENUE and the ability to see what spend produced what revenue? From creative, to campaign, to call to action, to sales rep, to upsell, to estimated customer life time value?
• Do you hold Sales AND Marketing accountable for hitting their projected goals (derived from your data and forecasting, of course)?
• Are you objective with your campaigns and know which ones to boost, cut or change based on the goals you set?
• Would you ‘find more money’ to spend on your campaigns to close even more leads if your acquisition costs were lower than you expected?

You can use this list as a checklist, but as you do, you’ll realize it’s just the beginning of getting a good sales and marketing relationship to work using data. The important take-a-way is to have the data and use the data to help drive your business – objectively – and spend less time in fire drills.

If you’re in need of a CRM solution to help you achieve the above, I encourage you to try Landslide CRM. We provide a simple, yet powerful way for your Sales and Marketing teams to leverage every step in growing your business. Our solution is something your Sales team will want to use, and your management team will see value in.

What other steps or tools would you include? What line from the video struck you most as something you’ve experienced in your organization and WHY? I’d like to read your comments.