An Over-reliance on Marketing

It’s a mistake to rely too heavily on marketing.

Give Me the Glengarry Leads

It is a mistake to wait for your marketing department to deliver you leads. If you wait for your marketing team to develop your leads you are practicing the most dangerous strategy in sales: waiting.

It doesn’t matter if marketing is supposed to generate leads or not. Your job is to create new opportunities and win them. The fact that marketing has not developed the leads that you need is not going to absolve you of your responsibility to win new business. And it may not save your job either.

An over-reliance on marketing is dangerous. You’re far safer taking your fate into your hands by prospecting and developing your own opportunities. Marketing is the sprinkles on the icing on the cake.

Nurture My Leads, Please

It’s also a mistake to believe that marketing can nurture your prospective clients for you. Our inboxes are full of marketing’s attempt to nurture relationships, and they end up filtered into a folder called “spam.” Because it isn’t personal, email filters believe the messages from marketing are spam. If marketing’s attempt to nurture your dream clients isn’t picked up by email filters, your dream client contacts believe it looks like spam and delete them.

If you want to own the relationship, then you have to do the nurturing. The content that you use may come from marketing and certainly some of it should. But the message is different if it comes from you, regardless of what the content is. The message is different because you were thinking of your prospective client when you sent it. That means it’s personal, especially if you added your thoughts and insights to the content that marketing created.

Marketing has an important role in the sales process. It’s above the funnel. It can create awareness. It can sometimes create a compelling case for change. Marketing can generate leads and share insights that help you create and win new opportunities. But you can do these things, too.

An over-reliance on marketing is dangerous. You can succeed with or without marketing generating your leads for you or nurturing your dream client accounts.