Should Sales or Marketing Own the Prospecting Process?

If you’re in Sales and you get your leads from Marketing, quit trying to kid anyone. You like it that way.  Let’s come clean on the reason — you hate having to prospect.

It’s time to grow up, put on your big boy or big girl sales pants and accept responsibility.  As much as you don’t like having to prospect, by having Marketing gather your leads it gives you an easy out when you miss your number.

You can admit it quietly. Nobody will hear you. But by having Marketing gather your leads, they become an easy scapegoat when you fall short on your sales quota.

I’m tired of this nonsense between Sales and Marketing.

It’s time for Sales to take control and own the entire prospecting process, including all lead generation. Don’t go whining over your quarterly spreadsheet about this, but rather own up to it.

If those of us in Sales are going to be responsible for quarterly numbers, then we need to own the entire process from start to finish.

We in Sales are the best ones to identify who is a good prospect and even who is a good lead to check out.  We’re the best ones, because we know who makes the best customer.

Once we in sales make the move and assume control, we can’t then create an even bigger problem by making lead generation be the responsibility of the newest person on the sales team.   This is a recipe for failure. Why would anyone put the person who knows the least be the one who determines what goes into the top of the funnel?  This logic doesn’t make sense.

Solution to all of this is every member of the sales team, regardless of their tenure or size of accounts they handle, needs to be have a prospecting quota objective.  High-performing salespeople know what a perfect customer looks like. They know this because they’re selling to them regularly. Because they know who a perfect customer is, it only makes sense for them to be able to identify who a perfect prospect is.

It’s time we in Sales own the entire prospecting process and allow Marketing to do what they do best, and that is to build awareness and educate the marketplace.

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Copyright 2018, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results