Because of our industry specialization, we speak with a lot of data center sales reps and sales leaders each year.
What I always first quite surprising is how few sales teams for data center providers are getting
- leads provided by their marketing teams and
- lead tracking data or basic lead intelligence beyond just a few basic form fields.
Help Your Team Better Compete in Today’s Buyer’s Journey
In a world where 60% to 90% of the decision-making process is over before most influencers and decision makers are ready for a sales conversation, marketing is controlling an enormous part of the buyer’s journey.
Yet in many cases, the processes and tools being used simply aren’t being deployed with the right strategy.
During the Inbound Sales Acceleration Webinar for Colocation Data Centers, we looked at why sales teams for data centers need better lead tracking. A short excerpt from that webinar recording follows below in this post.
How Should You Support Your Direct Data Center Sales Team with Lead Tracking?
Having a CRM (customer relationship management system) is essential. And that CRM needs to be fully integrated with your marketing platform.
And you need to use closed loop reporting, which ties sales results to marketing activities.
This way, when a contact is converted from a sales opportunity into a client, closed loop reporting goes back and highlights everything from the initial source of the lead to all along the full conversion path – all along the full buyer’s journey that contributed to that revenue.
Your software needs to be able to provide that level of detail.
But the reality is that we want visitors, the leads, the qualified leads, the sales-ready leads, and the opportunities – we want all of those that lead to revenue and the right kind of revenue. And the better the idea we have on the specifics on what leads to the right kinds of revenue, the more we can focus on what works really well. And stop doing the activities that don’t.
Does your sales team currently have access to lead tracking or, at least, basic lead intelligence when contact records are passed from the marketing to sales? Are your marketing and sales teams aligned, working towards common revenue goals and evaluating success with closed loop reporting? Share your thoughts in the Comments.
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