Subject:       Let’s Win Together!

To:                 Chief Marketing Officer

From:           Chief Sales Officer

Your Marketing Team matters more to our sales success than ever. Our prospects want to find and research companies like ours on their own – and much further into their buying process than ever before.  They prefer to do their research anonymously at first and educate themselves (and the 21 members of the decision committee) with information from websites, Linkedin groups, favorite blogs, even Twitter and Facebook.

Sales conversations (meetings, presentations and demo’s) no longer happen when they used to – early in the process! Back then Sales Reps were actually considered a helpful resource for buying teams learning their options.  In those days we could influence the sale or even head off the RFP, which almost never happens anymore.  Buyers today clearly don’t need us at all until THEY are ready!

What Sales needs from Marketing is Lead Management Technology, Content Marketing and Lead Nurturing. It’s the only way we can reach enough leads to keep the top of our sales funnel full.   We need Marketing to create new content that informs our targets and prospects at every stage of the buying process, even after they have started talking to Sales.   Drip them white papers, case studies, TCV and ROI calculators, analyst research, comparisons and implementation guides.   Score those clicks, downloads and pageviews; then let’s work together to decide when it’s best for sales to call those most active prospects.

A sales leader’s confession. We know we’ve never been good at demand generation.  Cold calling sucks for one thing, but it was our only and best option to find prospects.   (It’s also the first thing we stopped doing when a lead turned into a real opportunity.) The other thing is, our best competitors have already put lead management technologies, great content and best practices in place and they are kicking our tails!   No new leads means no new pipeline.

Like my kids say, “Let’s do this thing.”  If you and your marketing team will make demand generation your top priority, Sales promises our full support whenever and however needed.   Our commitment to Marketing is that every qualified lead you create will receive our priority attention and best effort to convert into a pipelined sales opportunity.

The real measure of sales and marketing success is company revenue growth. To make this successful for everyone let’s tie some bonus together.  We can mutually define our goals for sales-ready leads created, leads converted to qualified pipeline and even closed new business.  Both our teams can share in the success when we hit the targets. It’s that important to us!

How soon can we start?