Sales will be much better off when they get teleprospecting help from Marketing.
Marketing needs to drive higher quality leads and nothing improves lead quality like a telephone conversation. Sales needs to use outbound calling more effectively and nothing warms up that first live connection like a contact who knows who you are and already recognizes that you have good value to offer.
My first sales job actually involved a desk, a phone, a mirror and a telephone book and I did all my own prospecting. Since then, I’ve never stopped believing that a sales person who can’t prospect on the phone isn’t worth the chair they’re sitting in. I’ve also been irritated anytime I read that teleprospecting should be handed over to marketing.
I admit it. I’m a dinosaur. Worse, I have been a closed-minded dinosaur ( the worst kind) but now I finally see that for a myriad a reasons, outbound calling is something that both sales and marketing need to work on together.
Marketing can put campaigns and systems into place to help warm up contacts before sales invests the time into a live connection (because they’re hard to make) and I’ve found through personal experience that when the contact has even a hint that I might have something useful to offer before we actually connect, performance ratios improve dramatically.
Here’s the article by David Green in the B2B Lead Blog, which made me finally see how the two groups are stronger together.