Do you have to attend a sales and marketing status meeting on a regular basis? You know, one of those "what have you done for us lately" round tables? I've attended plenty of them and you can almost see the eyes rolling as the VP Marketing gives his report.
What Marketing Says:
"In January we completed 2 email campaigns, 1 trade show and 3 press releases. Of the 715 leads generated, 22 are considered "sales ready" (based on our ranking system of 10 points or higher), 80 showed "high interest" and 146 ranked in the "somewhat interested" category. The remainder have an unknown status but will be included in the on-going email campaigns.
Starting in February we initiated a new marketing program that enables end-users to request budgetary pricing for our products. Since the system uses our current price list we were able to correlate the requests to a dollar amount. For the month of February we uncovered 51 "sales ready" leads for a total opportunitiy amount of $3,991,767.66."
What the CxO and Sales People Hear:
"In January blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Starting in February blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah we uncovered 51 "sales ready" leads for a total opportunitiy amount of $3,991,767.66."
VP Sales: Uh, excuse me. What did you just say?
If you want to get the CxOs and VP Sales attention, you need to find a way to quantify hard sales opportunity numbers that they will understand. Made-up dollar amounts related to the number of articles read or whitepapers downloaded do not make sense to the sales team.