If your marketing is succeeding at the first two points – Amplifying Your Brand and Growing Your Audience – then you’ll be producing leads for your sales team. Where do you file all those website lead form fills or phone calls you’ve achieved? A well-organized CRM (customer relationship management tool) is critical. Marketing should take great concern and care for what information is captured in your CRM and how that information is organized. This enables informed decisions to be made about what kind of marketing efforts will help capitalize on new opportunities or achieve critical sales goals.

Does your sales team walk out the door to an initial connection meeting or that final touch point to help close the deal feeling confident and empowered? Are they ready to answer any questions or objections from the prospective client they’ve been working for months to land? A good set of printed materials that speak to your company's capabilities, product offerings, and differentiators makes all the difference. These can take many forms, but the key is that the messaging is consistent with all the other marketing a prospect has interacted with. That is the marketing team’s concern.

Maintaining a connection with a prospect until they become a customer can be done in many ways. While nothing can quite compare to direct human interaction in the form of a phone call or face-to-face meeting, offering valuable information in the form of an email can help keep a lead warm until it’s ready to close. Is your marketing team offering automated follow-ups to lead form fills and drip campaigns to contacts made at in-person events to help keep prospects connected to your brand in a meaningful way?

A marketing team that is regularly producing case studies and portfolio entries on their website give sales reps a great excuse to make a personal touch with a lead. Imagine the difference in a follow up message between, "Hey, are you ready to sign the proposal I sent you yet?" versus "We recently released this case study about a client who had a similar problem to yours and how we helped them save thousands of dollars. I thought I'd share their success story. Let me know if you have any questions." A good marketing team will consistently source success stories from their operations teams and find new ways to showcase your companies capabilities on your website.