The Critical Role of Sales Development in Inbound Marketing

Written by Doug Davidoff | @dougdavidoff

It sounds so promising. Create compelling content (consistently). Share and promote the content. Prospects engage, download stuff and become qualified leads.

Those leads are passed on to the sales team, who instantaneously reach out and are immediately welcomed into the prospect’s world. The meeting quickly turns into a bona fide sales opportunity. Proposals are requested, immediately acted upon and sales are made.

Sure, that scenario may be a little bit overstated, but isn’t this story the fundamental promise of inbound marketing? All of the data and statistics shared by inbound marketing practitioners talk of increased lead generation, lower costs per lead and higherROIs.

The answer to the question is a qualified, “Yes.”  Inbound marketing is instrumental in building predictable, sustainable and scalable sales growth, but it does not solve the entire problem.

The Chasm Between Leads and Sales

There’s a chasm that exists between sales and marketing. While effective inbound marketing does drive a higher volume of leads and qualified leads, that doesn’t mean that these leads are sales ready when they’re created.

Additionally, the very nature of inbound means that many of the leads you create, while qualified, won’t naturally move into a buying cycle with you. Gleastner Research identified that as many as 80% of the leads you create are caused because someone was looking for valuable content to answer a question or to solve a problem… not because they wanted to buy something.

What makes the chasm so nasty is that unless you have the right tools in place to manage and measure it, it is invisible to most executives. They can see that leads are being created, and they can see that the investment isn’t translating into high volume sales success. The phenomena is the primary reason that research done by CEB found that 87% of the words used by sales and marketing professionals in one discipline to describe the other are negative.

This chasm has two adverse consequences:

• The marketing function is often undervalued (or even overlooked), put off to the side to work on case studies, trade shows and “arts and crafts.”
• Far too much of the weight and pressure falls on the sales team. This was fine years ago when prospects needed to talk with sales people, differences between offers were clear and life was much simpler. Today, the world of sales is simply too complex to be left to the sales team alone.

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Personal Branding

BY Debra Walton Chief Content Officer, Thomson Reuters

Branding is crucial to succeed in today’s business world; strong parallels can be drawn between how corporations and individuals create them. The measures by which we judge a company, such as quality, service, reputation, etc., are also relevant on a personal level. In other words, it’s no longer just the product — your skills or your job title — that count. Having a strong brand means standing apart from the crowd because of other attributes.

A personal brand may sound like a foreign concept; however the underlying truths should strike a chord with all budding professionals. At the core is the strength of your product, and how you continue to hone the skills and talent that comprise it. Amplifying your personal brand is a process by which you overlay it with other attributes that attract positive attention, including the way you dress, your impact on others, and stepping up to and out into opportunities that present themselves.

So how do you start building a brand in the first place?

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Use a Task Map to Improve Your Team’s Performance

by Allison Rimm | AM February 27, 2014

If you’ve noticed your team is functioning unevenly and its esprit de corps isn’t what you’d hoped, it’s time for you to ask yourself whether your people are deployed optimally.

Employees’ skills and interests can evolve over time, as can the goals of your group, so misalignment can happen without your noticing it. That person who was hired to do analysis but has blossomed into a first-rate motivator and loves working with groups: Is he still stuck in front of a computer doing analysis? Is the employee who was recruited as a trainer feeling frustrated because she has no opportunity to take advantage of her extraordinary talent for writing?

I’ve found that there’s a powerful way to answer questions like these: Create a task map.

A task map is a visual tool that allows you to see where skills are lacking or duplicated on a team. It can help you assign tasks that will take advantage of each person’s abilities and interests. I’ve seen task maps lead to a boost in productivity and employee satisfaction through what seemed like minor shifts in responsibilities. I’ve also seen them lead to major transformations after leaders discovered they didn’t have the right people for the work at hand.

Helen, the head of Human Resources for an organization with more than 20,000 employees, realized that members of her leadership team had been performing inconsistently: They excelled in some aspects of their jobs while coming up short in others. Customer complaints were on the rise, and she noticed collaboration fading and competition mounting.

The first thing she did was assess leadership team members’ skills by looking at their past accomplishments and the results of 360-degree assessments. Next, she listed their primary, secondary, and tertiary abilities on a whiteboard. This allowed her to see redundancies and gaps that had arisen over time. For example, four directors were strong in analysis but only one had well-developed project-management skills. And although the group was responsible for educating thousands of employees each year, there were only two people with a talent for training and teaching.

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