How to Use a Marketing and Sales Funnel for Better Prospecting

A unified marketing and sales funnel is the solution to better prospecting in any organization.

In this episode of the Modern Marketing Engine podcast, my guest, A. Lee Judge, Global Digital Marketing Director at Hexagon GeoSystems, discusses his approach to digital marketing and how it is contributing to sales prospecting with a focus on quantifiable attribution. 

B2B Marketing leaders are being held to a higher standard in 2020. CEOs and CROs want to see marketing drive activities that demonstrably help salespeople be more productive. Sales prospecting is one of the most undesirable activities in sales. Marketers are asked to deliver marketing programs that enable sales prospecting to be more productive. 

Listen to this episode to learn more about how marketing can help sales to prospect better.

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How the Full Marketing and Sales Funnel Works

Marketing must identify the buyer persona using feedback from the sales team.

There must be a two-way communication between sales and marketing to clearly understand the changing needs of the customer.

Data shows that prospects will self educate and conduct research before engaging with a sales rep, so marketing must get ahead of the competition and educate their prospects first. How? By understanding the prospect’s questions and pain points, which sales knows really well.

Sales organizations should never hold back information from the marketing team, otherwise the competition may end up educating their prospective customers.

Lee says that organizations must understand that it’s the customer’s journey not the sales journey. And it's not a linear journey that they can control. That means neither sales nor marketing own that journey. There shouldn’t be a wall between sales and marketing when optimizing for the prospect’s journey.

Prospects will interact with sales and marketing on and off during their journey, talking to a sales rep, while reading the blog or social media posts, then going back to the sales rep and so on.

According to Lee, there is just one funnel, the Sales and Marketing Funnel. In traditional sales funnels, marketing doesn’t know what is going on with the SQLs they handed over to the sales team, so if there is a roadblock or lack of information, then marketing can’t help.

But when there is only one funnel, sales and marketing are in constant communication, collaborating to move leads through the funnel. Marketing can provide the content sales needs to help the prospect understand the solution and move through the funnel on their way to making a buying decision.

In his role as Global Digital Marketing Manager at Hexagon GeoSystems, Lee supports hundreds of marketers in this process, helping them use technology and understand the business, so they can have a clear view of sales and marketing activities and create content that is enabled for sales.

The Modern Marketer is Data Savvy

Today’s modern marketer is not just a creative person who creates great content, but also a very data-savvy marketer.

The modern marketer must understand data because data is what holds marketing and sales together.

Data will help marketers understand where people came from, how they responded, as well as to segment people by campaigns. That data must be shared with sales so they know what the prospect’s needs are.

Marketing should be able to show Sales a picture of the customer’s journey. For example, how many times the prospects visited the website and which pages, how many emails they received and opened, which webinars they attended and so on.

The prospect’s digital journey provides very valuable information for the sales reps. That means marketing needs to collect that data and make it easily accessible to sales.

“Marketing can’t qualify, Lee says, “but if sales lets marketing know who they are looking for and what they expect to know, then marketing should be able to set up the processes to deliver on that information.”

How to measure attribution

Lee tells the story of a company who made the decision to cut particular tradeshows from their budget based on the information the sales people put in the CRM.

The sales reps were asked to identify which deals could be attributed to trade shows. The CEO didn’t cut the show which was attributed to deals, hence proving to deliver ROI, but cut the rest of the events from the budget.

This story illustrates the importance of attribution data.

The attribution dilemma stems from the difficulty of connecting an opportunity to a multi-touch sales cycle. Was it the first touch, the last touch, or several touches?

Lee says there is no right or wrong answer to this question. It depends on the length of the sales cycle, how in sync sales and marketing are, and the structure of the CRM and the tech stack.

If there is a culture of documentation within a company, then attribution is easier. Such a culture states that “if it’s not in CRM, it didn’t happen.” When sellers take the time to document in the CRM what they did, not only do they help marketers know what is going on, but they can prove the ROI of their sales tools.

Finally, Lee says that the bottom-line message for sales and marketing is to keep the one team mindset in mind, communicating with each other, knowing both have the same goal.

Outline of this Episode

• [3:00] About Hexagon GeoSystems and A. Lee Judge
• [6:10] How Marketing Can Help Sales Target Prospects
• [11:05] The role of technology in the sales and marketing funnel
• [12:50] The characteristics of the modern marketer
• [20:01] Sales Prospecting Attribution 
• [26:14] The one team mindset for sales and marketing

Featured on this Episode

• Connect with A. Lee Judge on LinkedIn
• Follow A. Lee Judge on Twitter: @ALeeJudge
• Website

Resources & People Mentioned

• The Modern Selling Podcast with Vengreso CEO, Mario Martinez, Jr.

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