The Account Based Approach: What Marketing Can Learn from Sales

The Account Based Approach: What Marketing Can Learn from Sales

In past lives, I’ve been witness/participant as the Marketing/Sales or Sales/Marketing disciplines have battled one another. Sales thinking “What exactly do they do? We need more leads.” and Marketing thinking, “They don’t use anything we give them. They just want us to do their jobs for them.”

Having worked both sides of the spectrum, it came down to this: Sales is easy to measure because you are paid when dollars are collected, Marketing is hard to measure because generating leads takes time. (until we get that Inception Pasiv dream thing going) This is especially true in the C Suite where Marketing has struggled to communicate value and the Sales team is able to justify more and more resources.

With that as a background, you will find this webinar to be worth the time. The Demandbase B2B marketing wizards take us through their attempts to bring the Sales team into the Marketing process from the beginning. They use a “race form” analogy to handicap marketing events and a discussion about how they challenge their list and lead vendors to narrow their focus based on customer profiles that don’t fit the neat “title, size, industry” classifications, in order to make their points.

(Things my friends at GoLeads and Datafiniti are working on every day)

Watch the webinar here:

(I’m not sure how long it will stay up, so let me know if the link dies!)

My biggest takeaways?

Narrow your focus. Yes, you may be walking by some verticals and opportunities that will be worthwhile, but good things happen when you’re relentlessly efficient. Like an animal.

Work to understand what marketing touches, or attributes, influence actual sales. I’m a huge fan of tagging leads according to content consumed but there might be more insight to be gained by digging in a bit further.

Enjoy.

Good stuff.