8 Reasons Why Marketing Is Letting Sales Down | Fusion - WeRIndia

Sales are slow, revenue is down, at this point you need to diagnose the problems and make changes immediately so your team doesn’t fall short of the goals this quarter.

Marketing and sales should work simultaneously, but in most companies, they are departments that don’t even speak to each other.

Marketing and sales teams need to work hand in hand to guide customers through the buying process.

For marketing to truly prove its value, it must provide complete and comprehensive support for sales.

Most marketing teams don’t have a shortage of content, but lack of accessibility, relevance, context, and customization of that content is still letting sales down in a big way.

Here are the reasons you need to know why marketing is letting sales down:

 1. Content is irrelevant and outdated

Most of the time content you produce isn’t effective at delivering business value. That’s right—a clear majority of marketers admit that their own content isn’t useful.

It can be difficult for marketers to gain any visibility into whether their content is even being used, never mind if it’s resonating in the field.

Marketers need to increase visibility into content usage to find out what content is useful and what needs to be updated or removed altogether.

2. Conflicts with marketing

If marketing and sales aren’t aligned, this will reflect in your sales numbers. When the hand off of leads from marketing isn’t smooth, or if the two groups have vastly different goals, you need to work on your alignment with marketing.

3.  CRM is underutilized

If you’re using Sales force or another Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software correctly, it can be an inconceivably helpful device for sales persons and managers. But if you haven’t customized your CRM or don’t follow best practices, you’re wasting a powerful tool.

4. Working unqualified leads

If marketing is handing over unqualified sales inquiries, even a huge number of leads is not helpful to your sales team. Your persons will be wasting time chasing down prospects who aren’t interested in your product, have no purchasing power, or aren’t in the right industry. Implement a plan to qualify leads extensively before handing them to sales.

5. Not enough sales training

With everything else on sales managers’ plates, coaching can easily fall through the cracks. Make sure your sales team is receiving consistent, one-on-one coaching focused on improving their sales skills to boost performance. If you have not invested enough time into training your sales team, you will not see the high sales performance you’d like.

Extensive training on products, re-training on new products, sales training classes, and more, are all necessary to see your workforce to succeed long-term.

6. Hiring the wrong people

Hiring talented sales persons can be extremely difficult. You need to hire people who are smart, passionate and willing to be coached to success. Take a good look at your team and consider if maybe you’ve hired the wrong kind of persons, and consider re-tooling your hiring process altogether.

7. Ignoring the competition

If you’re not aware of what your major competitors are doing, you’re flying blind. Look to see whether your competitors have seen an increase in sales, while you’re experiencing a decrease. This means you have a serious problem, and need to ramp up marketing and sales to take back some of the market share.

8. No sales follow-up

Your sales persons should follow up on every single lead, no matter what. Look at the follow-up numbers for the past few months and pinpoint any leads that are being ignored. If your sales team is dropping the ball on any of your leads, it can lead to fewer deals closed.

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