What should marketing do when salespeople are drowning in work?

How can marketing help sales team?

If you tell me that you’re not even thinking about marketing because your salespeople are drowning in leads and can’t deliver everything anyway, then you’re basically the case for which I have a cure. It’s a pretty effective medicine whose ROI I can easily and quickly calculate and prove.

The sales manager who says his people are drowning in leads is a “best fit” lead for FrodX.

Basically, the key premise of most agencies today, which have matured at least a bit beyond the art of designing ads and managing media buying, is that they are now creating leads for you. A combination of sweepstakes, a bit of advertising, a nice event or two, remember to include influencers, too, and—whoops!—in one month a thousand people come to test-drive premium cars on the weekend.

 

So here we are again: quality leads over quantity, right?

 

It’s nice for us to offer a test drive in that type of car even to people whose last car purchase was a six-year-old Megane, even if they haven’t shown the right kind of interest in the purchasing conditions before the test drive, right? Well . . . c’mon, let’s look at this a different way. Anyone who’s met me in person knows that I could get to the top of Mt. Šmarna ten minutes faster if I weighed 30 kg less. Even more easily if I dropped 50. It’s pretty much the same with the leads you bring to the purchase. Let me explain.

In the business world, future expectations are shaped by past results.

Looking back at previous years, it can be argued with considerable certainty that it’s almost impossible that more than fifty of these luxury cars will be sold in the next three months. And it can be assumed that a more aggressive campaign will bring in a larger proportion of the people that will buy this car in the next three months for a test drive.

Imagine that the dealership running the campaign has five sales reps that sell these cars. Imagine the effort: each one will have to deal with two hundred leads for the next sixty working days to detect the ten that represent a real business opportunity, try to develop a relationship with them, and close the deal.

 

There are tools for “filtering” leads, so that we don’t waste time on unpromising ones.

 

Imagine the relief if “smart” algorithms were used to cut out half of the leads; the ones for whom we’re 90% sure that they won’t convert. Of course, we’re running the risk of overlooking at most one buyer, but we’ve doubled the sales rep’s capacity. With the help of some technology, smart algorithms, and our skills, we could increase auto sales from ten per sales rep to eighteen per rep. We probably can’t (significantly) increase the market, but we can certainly increase the effectiveness of an individual sales rep.

We’ve already done the testing and hard work for you

I don’t know how explain the business aspect of this story in simpler terms than that. Of course, these simple and easily composed words—some technology and smart algorithms—are backed by huge amounts of sweat, uncertainty, and experimentation, and above all, know-how and persistence. Otherwise, of course, we wouldn’t have the heart to take half of your savings as our share of the credit.

If you’d like to chat about smart algorithms and take a look at the technology, just book a short meeting with me. I’ll show you some info I can’t write about publically. 😉