How can marketing truly impact sales?

Jill Konrath, blogger, author,  and organizer of the fantastic She-Bang conference wrote a great eBook on how marketing can impact sales.  It's a must-read for companies who have problems like this (and who doesn't?):

• Getting new sales reps up to speed
• Sales reps pursue the wrong leads
• Forecasts are based on hunches and guesses instead of real data

One of the best ideas I got from Jill was to focus on your "average Joes," those sales reps who make up the middle 60% of your sales team.  Too often we either spend too much time on our top performers -- since they are often the squeaky wheels who know how to stay on top of marketing (and everyone else) to get what they need -- or the bottom players, since we feel bad for our colleagues who are in danger of losing their jobs.   Jill tells us how to point our compass in the right direction.

If you are a marketer concerned with demand generation and lead management, you should check it out.

** Update:  I just checked and the free eBook has over 2,000 downloads.  Would love to hear what ideas have resonated with you.

Comments

[Prashant]

Steve,
Thanks for sharing. Here is an interesting post I came across on the TechTarget blog My Educated Guess (http://myeducatedguess.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/06/09/extending-marketing-content-to-maximize-opportunities-and-facilitate-demand/).

While sales is in tune with what a customer wants, marketers (savvy ones) are in tune with the customer needs. With the shift from info age to conversation age it seems like Marketers can impact sales by understanding better what the customers' needs are and helping sales deliver them.