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Dear Marketing, Your Leads Are Crap

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

Marketing, I know things have been difficult between us lately, but I need to bare my soul unto you: the leads you have been passing off to the sales team, are for lack of a better word, complete crap.

Every time I follow up with a new prospect, they are unqualified and have no real interest or need for our solution. Our executive team is having trouble taking you seriously, they are perceiving you to be nothing more than an expense with no measurable contribution to the bottom line.

Although you’re on the other side of the room, it’s as if we’re a million miles apart. We work independently of each other with no communication between us.

We haven’t worked together to define our buyer personas to ensure all content caters to their needs and guides them along the buying journey. It’s wrong of me to cast 100% of the blame unto you — to be honest, the sales team and I haven’t made any efforts to align either.

We are completely siloed, and have no communication between departments. We both need to be held accountable to revenue-driven outcomes, not separate vanity metrics.

It’s time we change that.

Why do we need to be aligned?

According to Aberdeen, companies with great alignment between sales and marketing create better content visibility and drive better results. 99% of their sales teams reach quota versus 46% for laggard companies.

Marketing, here’s how we can work together to generate better leads:

Step 1: Forget vanity metrics like impressions, views, bounce rates, and click through rates.

Step 2: Let’s make better serving the buyer our #1 priority.

Step 3: We must sit down and define our buyer personas in great depth to get the best understanding of their needs and wants through each stage of the buying journey.

Step 4: Let’s make it a mandate to collaborate on creating content together.

Step 5: Make your content easy for us to find, organize it into a content library or invest in an employee advocacy platform.

Step 6: Let’s keep each other in the loop: we must communicate often, work closely, and collaborate in meetings.

The Bottom Line

Marketing, I know we can make this work. Us salespeople have faith in your abilities to help fill the pipeline with qualified leads using buyer-centric content. We must collaborate to make all of this work out.

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