Yes, I said marketing. When it comes to B2B product sales, we believe that sales and marketing should work as a team, with separate roles but a shared aim—shortening the sales cycle. The way we see it, marketing’s primary role should be prequalification of suspect lists to build the sales pipeline and provide cleaner databases. Marketing should focus on suspects, freeing frontline sales to concentrate on customers and prospects already in the pipeline and ready to purchase or upgrade. So how does marketing prequalify and warm up those suspects? With integrated lead generation programs—like webinars, trade shows, partner marketing, sponsorship with trade affiliations—or isolated online and offline tactics, or timed teleservices with pre-call tactics (NOT “script-read” cold calling). Know your role and success is yours!

Tags: B2B Marketing and Communications, Business to Business Marketing, Database Management, Database Marketing, Integrated Lead Generation, Lead Generation, Marketing Best Practices, Partner Marketing, Sales Pipeline, Sales Process, Sales Support, Sarah Pyle, Sponsorships, TME Communications, Trade Affiliations, Trade Shows, Webinars

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Sales Process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.