When Sales and Marketing don't get along, the cost to the organizations is immense. This hit home for me a few days ago when a sales person sent me a follow up email that actually made me angry.
I’d attended a webinar, which was well-prepared. Clearly the company hosting it invested a fair amount of time and money promoting it and getting people to sign up. After the event, we attendees received a follow up email with the webinar materials included. That part was great.
Then I got another email. This should have been the personal follow up that brought me into a closer relationship with the company.
Have a look at this and tell me how welcomed you feel:
Subject: Hi Kim, , thought you may find this interesting.
Email Text:
Hi Kim,
Good morning – and I hope you’re well.
I came across the attached and thought you may find it interesting.
Have a great week.
My best,
[sales rep name - removed to protect the guilty]
Attached was a PDF that was clearly not just something he 'ran across' while he had my needs top of mind – It was a marketing piece about his company's technology.
It pissed me off that I'm that unimportant as to receive a “personalized” email with nothing of value in it.
This is why Sales needs Marketing. If this organization had the tools inside the email construction process to connect appropriate marketing messages with rich customer data about me, the email creation might have gone like this:
• The sales person calls up my Interest Profile: resources I've read, visits to their website I've made, webinars I've attended or at least registered for
• Sales also has access to information about what my company does
• That information is connected to value propositions created by Marketing for the industry we’re associated with – so the sales person has easy access to targeted messaging
If I’d received a thoughtfully constructed email that addressed my real concerns (and that’s not hard – as a business owner I have a lot of real concerns), that would have been the start of a good connection.
Without the tools to measure my interests and access relevant messages, sales people are left stranded and isolated, trying to come up with something to say. They figure something is better than nothing and so they spam the lead list, hoping they’ll make a hit or at least can show that people opened their email, even if it had a negative impact. To top it off, with a personal email, there's no way to unsubscribe and hence no possibility for them to receive negative feedback.
Even though the sales person took an action – what did it produce? To really increase an organization’s revenue, Sales and Marketing need to partner to create communications that add value to those of us who receive them.
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