How to Use a Marketing and Sales Funnel for Better Prospecting

A unified marketing and sales funnel is the solution to better prospecting in any organization.

In this episode of the Modern Marketing Engine podcast, my guest, A. Lee Judge, Global Digital Marketing Director at Hexagon GeoSystems, discusses his approach to digital marketing and how it is contributing to sales prospecting with a focus on quantifiable attribution. 

B2B Marketing leaders are being held to a higher standard in 2020. CEOs and CROs want to see marketing drive activities that demonstrably help salespeople be more productive. Sales prospecting is one of the most undesirable activities in sales. Marketers are asked to deliver marketing programs that enable sales prospecting to be more productive. 

Listen to this episode to learn more about how marketing can help sales to prospect better.

This podcast is brought to you by Postal.io. A Sales and marketing engagement platform that generates leads increases sales and improves customer retention. Request a demo to learn how to integrate direct mail and gift into your existing strategy by visiting Postal.io.

How the Full Marketing and Sales Funnel Works

Marketing must identify the buyer persona using feedback from the sales team.

There must be a two-way communication between sales and marketing to clearly understand the changing needs of the customer.

Data shows that prospects will self educate and conduct research before engaging with a sales rep, so marketing must get ahead of the competition and educate their prospects first. How? By understanding the prospect’s questions and pain points, which sales knows really well.

Sales organizations should never hold back information from the marketing team, otherwise the competition may end up educating their prospective customers.

Lee says that organizations must understand that it’s the customer’s journey not the sales journey. And it's not a linear journey that they can control. That means neither sales nor marketing own that journey. There shouldn’t be a wall between sales and marketing when optimizing for the prospect’s journey.

Prospects will interact with sales and marketing on and off during their journey, talking to a sales rep, while reading the blog or social media posts, then going back to the sales rep and so on.

According to Lee, there is just one funnel, the Sales and Marketing Funnel. In traditional sales funnels, marketing doesn’t know what is going on with the SQLs they handed over to the sales team, so if there is a roadblock or lack of information, then marketing can’t help.

But when there is only one funnel, sales and marketing are in constant communication, collaborating to move leads through the funnel. Marketing can provide the content sales needs to help the prospect understand the solution and move through the funnel on their way to making a buying decision.

In his role as Global Digital Marketing Manager at Hexagon GeoSystems, Lee supports hundreds of marketers in this process, helping them use technology and understand the business, so they can have a clear view of sales and marketing activities and create content that is enabled for sales.

The Modern Marketer is Data Savvy

Today’s modern marketer is not just a creative person who creates great content, but also a very data-savvy marketer.

The modern marketer must understand data because data is what holds marketing and sales together.

Data will help marketers understand where people came from, how they responded, as well as to segment people by campaigns. That data must be shared with sales so they know what the prospect’s needs are.

Marketing should be able to show Sales a picture of the customer’s journey. For example, how many times the prospects visited the website and which pages, how many emails they received and opened, which webinars they attended and so on.

The prospect’s digital journey provides very valuable information for the sales reps.