Sales, marketing, processes and lemmings

A popular misconception about lemmings is that once and a while they all suddenly run off a cliff to commit suicide. 

Unfortunately it’s not a misconception when talking about sales and marketing processes in a professional services environment.

As I’ve mentioned before, there are generally only six core sales and marketing activities in any organisation:

• Generate leads
• Qualify prospects
• Close customers
• Delivery
• Account management
• Review and plan

Knowing this makes life fairly easy because you can review and measure the effectiveness of each activity in your pipeline and how the activities are connected.

I say this because the most common problem I see in organisations is the disconnect between various activities, with one process not automatically handing over to the next.

For instance:

• Leads being generated but not being qualified.
• Prospects identified but not being sold to.
• Sales closed but services not being delivered.

I was once involved in a campaign where we delivered qualified prospects to a car yard – people who were in the market for a new car and wanted to test drive the model.

The initial campaign failed because the sales team was hesitant to call the prospects “as they may have changed their mind and that would be depressing”. 

The campaign was saved by changing our process to finish with a booked test drive rather than just contact details of a hot prospect.

Recently I ran a new client engagement campaign for a professional services organisations.

After running a series of events in an agenda I found that the main sales person, who was also the CEO, was simply too busy to do anything with the new relationships we had developed.

Sadly, I can’t see this issue changing because the sales and marketing function of most professional services organisations never gets the focus it deserves, and as people are turned over the lessons will be there to be learnt again and again. 

Like lemmings, almost.

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club and Flinders Pacific. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam and is the sole Australian representative of the City of London for Foreign Direct Investment. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.