{"id":7938,"date":"2011-02-10T15:48:07","date_gmt":"2011-02-10T15:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/?p=7938"},"modified":"2019-01-26T22:45:41","modified_gmt":"2019-01-26T22:45:41","slug":"ceos-do-you-have-a-sales-and-marketing-blind-spot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/?p=7938","title":{"rendered":"CEO\u2019S \u2013 Do You Have a Sales and Marketing Blind Spot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>CEO\u2019s, as quickly as your schedule allows plan a lunch meeting for you and your heads of sales and marketing; the subject: <strong>Sales Ready Leads<\/strong>.\u00a0\u00a0 (<em>Why the urgency?\u00a0 If you have any issues filling your sales pipeline with leads you want to know that in your first quarter, not the fourth!<\/em>)<\/p>\n<p>When the three of you are at the table ask them each this question, \u201cHow our we doing on creating new leads for the sales force?\u201d\u00a0 But allow them to each to answer separately.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Expect answers like these if your marketing team is playing by the old rules.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs you know, our brand evaluation is done and we are incorporating the recommendations into our new corporate look and feel.\u00a0\u00a0 We are almost done with our website SEO enhancements so we can boost our Google rankings.\u00a0 We have a new overview brochure ready \u2013 it does an excellent job telling the \u2018Why Our Company\u2019 story. \u00a0\u00a0Our booth concept for this year\u2019s expo is spectacular.\u00a0 Oh, almost forgot!\u00a0\u00a0 We finished updating PowerPoints for all our offerings, the new graphics really pop!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Unless the real answer from your chief marketing officer was <strong><em>much<\/em><\/strong> different, (we\u2019ll get to that in an upcoming post), then expect your sales leader\u2019s response to go like this.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s just like I told you.\u00a0 If we want leads then Sales has to find them ourselves, develop them on our own and hope we can keep them interested while we are working the other deals in our pipeline.\u00a0 It\u2019s not what we\u2019re best at, but it\u2019s our only choice.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If your actual conversation with your marketing and sales leaders went anything like this fictional one did, then your challenge is now clear. \u00a0\u00a0Furthermore, if you expect revenue growth from new logos then solving it needs to be one of your top priorities. \u00a0The reason is that the B2B buying\/selling world has changed significantly and companies still trying to engage their prospects like these two leaders are falling farther and farther behind their competitors.<\/p>\n<p>Your immediate next steps depend on how strongly you believe in your current marketing and sales leaders.\u00a0\u00a0 At a minimum they both need major skills upgrades.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s also possible they are not the right ones to lead these critical functions out of 1.0 status and into an integrated B2B sales and marketing process built on today\u2019s best practices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CEO\u2019s, as quickly as your schedule allows plan a lunch meeting for you and your heads of sales and marketing; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,22],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7938"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7938"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8184,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7938\/revisions\/8184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}