In our daily conversations with ISVs, we’ve noticed some common trends in their marketing strategies. Some of these trends lead toward success, while others seem to lead to stagnation, if not outright failure. What separates a successful ISV who’s able to consistently generate new customers and VAR partnerships, from a struggling ISV who can’t seem to get it right?
One of the marketing success factors that has become increasingly clear to me in recent weeks is the quality of the relationship between sales and marketing teams. Nearly every Dynamics ISV that seems to be winning in the marketplace is managing their sales and marketing teams in a very specific way when it comes to prospects and lead generation. The approach is this: there are specific marketing people in the company who are only responsible for generating leads for the sales team. This is their only function within the marketing team. Sales people are responsible for making sales, and should only be prospecting about 10-15% of the time.
Does this approach sound familiar to you?
For one thing, it is dead easy for marketing professionals to justify their existence when they can show how they help accelerate the sales pipeline. Marketing professionals are great (or they’re supposed to be) at nurturing a contact and extracting the most viable prospects. Sales professionals are are great (or will appear that way) when they are spending their time dealing with only the warmest leads.
Further, it keeps a marketing team’s goals front and center. What is the real objective, and for any marketing investment, how does it serve that objective? Can you prioritize marketing projects based on their potential to help sales?
And finally, it makes it a lot easier to set performance goals for a marketing team that will drive positive results. If your marketing team has never heard of a lead generation quota, what else are they doing with their time that’s more valuable?
