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Prospecting...marketing Or Sales
Posted By: lara on 9/18/2006 4:00 PM (CST) 500 Points
Hi all,

I'd like to get your opinion & insights on the following question:
Is prospecting the job of sales or marketing? Why?

Some background on our initiative which prompted this question...We are currently undergoing prospecting calls to event planners across North America, from a purchased list, to find out if there's a potential for us to do business together. The sales group believes that prospecting is the role of marketing and marketing believes that prospecting is the role of sales.

What do you think?

Posted by: DR Hitch* Accepted Answer
9/18/2006 4:49 PM (CST)
Ha, ha.....welcome to "stovepiped" corporate structure.

(sales) prospecting and (business) development are BOTH "sales" jobs......

Conducting "market research" including focus groups and developing the "why to buy" sales tools including how to train your own sales force is a "marketing" job.

Now, developing the phone script or the mailing card for the "prospecting" may be a marketing job, but EXECUTING the prospecting plan is 'sales' job.

The flip side is that when sales turn "south", the sales team will blame marketing for lousy market positioning and branding. But if sales are good, the marketing dept. won't get any credit either.....
 
Posted by: mgoodman Accepted Answer
9/18/2006 6:40 PM (CST)
I instinctively resist trying to answer the question you ask because it presupposes that Marketing and Sales are independent functions. In fact, they are very closely interrelated. Sales is an integral part of Marketing -- the part that deals with the customer interface.

Thus the correct answer to your question is: Yes, prospecting is the job of Sales and/or Marketing.

The real answer will depend on the industry, company culture, where the skill sets lie, and how you're organized. If Sales and Marketing are still so separate and distinct in your company, then that's a large part of the reason you're struggling with the question.

Prospecting is a job that needs to be done by Marketing -- including the Sales function (which, after all, is part of Marketing).
 
Posted by: Chad Kerlegan* Accepted Answer
9/18/2006 7:02 PM (CST)
Who's job is it anyway? Ok so here's a generic question...using a retail mall store...that employs sales associates.

Who's job is it to get opportunities, i.e. prospects through the front door? Is it the Sales Associates, Business Owner's or the Malls' job?

Since you're in marketing find out what it takes to actually sell a client on your services. Go out in the field with your best rep and find out what it takes to close a deal...And then formulate your marketing behind a real deal.

Forget all of the pretty creative stuff...Don't worry about who gets credit because if you're job is done well you'll be able to prove how many "interested" prospects you've created due to your marketing efforts.

So here's my answer to your question...Prospecting is both a sales and marketing job. For sales because it is a REQUIRED task and for marketing because you don't want your sales spending the majority of their selling time prospecting.

Stay Cool
 
Posted by: lara Author Response
9/18/2006 9:08 PM (CST)
Very interesting answers so far...

Mgoodman - I hear what you're saying about sales & marketing working together cohesively...in the end, our collective goal is to drive business through relationships and reputation. In our case, we have a sales department of 3 (4 if you include the president), I am the Marketing Department. In other words, we're lean. We're in a very enviable position in that 99% of our business is repeat / referral. Our sales group is 99% reactive and 1% proactive. However, being new to the company, I am trying to foster a culture of proactivity - I am making a lot of headway; however, am finding that most of the "proactivity" is falling in my court. I believe that this comes down to fear - fear of cold calling, fear of working with a new CRM system, fear of the unknown.

I say all of this because I don't agree that cold calling / prospecting is the mutual responsibility of sales and marketing. Chad's analogy is interesting...but driving customers to your brand / company is a very different task from picking up the phone and calling prospects with the intent of 1) qualifying them, 2) building a relationship with the end goal of making a sale / forging a partnership. After all...isn't this what salespeople are trained to do? Hmmmm...keep the feedback coming!!
 
Posted by: W.M.M.A. Accepted Answer
9/18/2006 9:18 PM (CST)
lara, I must agree w/mike and you about differing issues.
you are right to separate the two responsibilities. seeking to uncover market opportunities is completely different than seeking to uncover sales opportunities. one would be vertical, the other horizontal (but that can also be argued, eh?)

OK, let's talk about "cold-calling"...do you take the position that in, and of itself, cold-calling is a necessity? or, do you prefer to accept the proposition that relationship development, via other means is more acceptable. (this is a new can of worms, on an old topic).

Randall
WMMA
 
Posted by: sunilkaul69 Accepted Answer
9/19/2006 1:00 AM (CST)
Marketing domain would consist of the following tasks:

Market Research, Strategic Planning, Corporate Vision Statement, Corporate Identity and Image, Pricing Analysis, Product Audits, New Product Rollouts, Marketing Communications, Product Promotions, Customer Database Management: Internal Communications, Agency Evaluation, Public Relations, Trade Shows, Media Selection.
Marketing promotes an explicit company product or service image through communications in order to generate quality sales leads.

Therefore rospecting is a marketing job it is normally executed by the sales force. Marketing sepearates prospects from suspects and sales force converts a prospect into a customer.
 
Posted by: lara Author Response
9/19/2006 9:28 AM (CST)
W.M.M.A. - great question, and yes, you're right, an old one. To answer it as briefly as I can...in our business I believe that the vast majority of our time should be spent on fostering existing relationships; however, I also believe (and have seen it too many times throughout the years) that losing a business can be out of your hands sometimes (corporate mergers, Sr. Management changes, new corporate direction, etc). So the questions I ask our people is "What would happen if we lost our 5 biggest clients?", and "What are we doing to prevent our competitors from taking our existing clients?".
The first question speaks more to proactive selling. The second to relationship building / communicating value. To date, we have never proactively sold our business. This is where a number of initiatives come into play - only one of them being cold calling / prospecting. Other initiatives include networking, soliciting referrals from existing customer base, marcomm activities, etc.
My challenge is one of changing a corporate culture from reactive to proactive.
 
Posted by: Frank Hurtte Accepted Answer
9/19/2006 9:57 AM (CST)
lara,
In a sales and marketing organization of 5 there is no clear rule as to who does what of anything. It would be my thought that if the President (and owner?) of the firm is viewed as a salesperson, you will need to influence him first. I have worked with organizations where the President was 100% proactive.. and the company culture was jump from one new customer to another w/o much thought as to how to keep them. And on the other end was a company that was 100% reactive... in tough times they felt hopeless and lost.

In my mind, you need to begin setting a plan in place that reduces the walls between your job in marketing and the sales force. Think of marketing as a longer range sales strategy... because your current sales people think of themselves as being in the what ever happens today mode.
 
Posted by: stevea Accepted Answer
9/19/2006 11:23 AM (CST)
Applying Reductio ad Absurdum is useful here, but you have to be prepared to go through some multi-stage arguments to arrive at a conclusion. If you push your question to its logical extremes, you should be able to see where it fall apart or even if it is sound in the first place.

Start off with two questions which push this to the boundaries: “Should sales people spend all day prospecting or all day on face-to-face selling?” And “Should marketing handle all lead generation and all appointment making” After all, appointment making is not selling!

Next, ask the basic question, “When does a sales person generate the sales on which the company is dependent?” The answer is, “When they are closing deals, usually in face to face meetings”

And what do they need to do to get to being able to close those deals? They need to make appointments.

And how do they maximize the number of appointments? They need to have good quality leads and to organise their day effectively so that they can travel to those appointments with maximum efficiency.

Finally, how do they ensure they have enough quality leads? They need to augment their supply from marketing with their own prospecting.

Clearly, a salesperson will accrue no sales if they don’t see anyone. They also won’t make many sales if they waffle or flounder in their presentations. You maximize the volume of sales by getting the quantity of presentations as high as possible, whilst maintaining a high quality of closing. Getting the quantity of appointments right is a lot easier if the quantity of leads is sufficient and their quality is high enough to allow them to make many appointments in a short time on the phone.

As the volume of sales is determined by face-to-face activities, it makes sense that other activities carried out by sales people should maximize their available face-to-face selling time. Report writing, quote writing, driving to the prospect and so on should be scheduled out of the key face-to-face contact times. Prospecting isn’t face to face selling, it is a prelude to it, so where possible it should not cannibalise presentation time. So far, so logical!

See part 2 for my conclusion!

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions
 
Posted by: stevea Accepted Answer
9/19/2006 11:24 AM (CST)
Part 2 Conclusions

Prospecting is part of lead generation and as such might therefore be seen to come under a marketing brief. It doesn’t. Most leads, generated by the mix of marketing activities have a “Pull” value. The quality of the lead is usually good because the prospect has been motivated to make an enquiry from your advertising, press release activity, mail shot or from a web site. Prospecting is “Push Marketing” The sales person is identifying a prospect and going directly or indirectly to them. They are creating an interest and developing it until the quality of a prospected lead is as good as marketing based leads. That’s sales activity.

Prospecting is not Telemarketing. Telemarketing is a volume business and to be successful, it has to rely on weeding out only the best prospects to put in front of sales people. It is however a marketing activity. In Telemarketing the prospect is responding to being prompted by an unexpected phone call. A good telemarketing professional will seek to unearth a genuine level of interest in your products, producing a decent quality of lead. When a sales person prospects, they are fulfilling a different mandate but what is it?

Prospecting from a sales person is opportunistic, intelligence based or by referral. The opportunistic part is based on physically spotting companies which look to be of interest whist the sales person is already in the field. They call at reception, sometimes trying to see someone on spec and certainly garnering a couple of relevant names, phone numbers etc. That which is hard to extract over the telephone is surprisingly easy at reception, if you know how! They also leave their own literature, a brief note and a calling card.

The second type, intelligence based, cannot be carried out by marketing staff unless they have the same background, training and opportunities that a salesman has. They look at a particular type of company and burrow their way into it – often speaking to a number of people who are not decision makers in order to be able to speak to the person who might place an order. This is skilled sales work, building a working relationship within a company in order to have a realistic chance of making a pitch.

The third, sales person only, form of prospecting is to ask for referrals, either within a large organisation or from companies which are known to the client. This is pure prospecting, where “Mr Smith suggested that I give you / him a call” will open doors that a cold call will not.

None of this is to be confused with cold calling. There is an increasing body of thought which states that the cold call is inefficient and can damage sales efforts. For more on this, see Frank Rumbauskas of “Cold Calling is a Waste of Time”; www.nevercoldcall.com In my industry, having sales people cold call is truly a waste of time. It takes about 1000 telephone calls to get an order! Sales people whose targets depend on success in face-to-face meetings should not be wasting their time on unproductive telephone work.


Does this type of prospecting fit into sales or marketing? The activities I’ve defined can only be carried out by a salesman. But there is a cost which begs the question, “Should field sales people be doing this?” “What is the cost to face-to-face sales time?” A salesman needs to make presentations or he doesn’t make sales, therefore he needs to make appointments. Should the salesman be spending his time making the appointments?

Usually the answer is yes but it is a balancing act. Most companies find that when sales people are disenfranchised from the appointment making process, both the number appointments and the quality of the appointments suffer. Only the sales person knows if a lead is worth turning into an appointment. Only a salesman can intelligently pre-qualify the situation. Appointment makers tend to be numerically targeted and thus will make appointments for the sake of their figures, not for the sake of the outcome.

As marketing usually cannot produce enough leads to allow the salesman to make enough appointments, then he needs to augment the volume of leads with ones he generates himself. Prospecting for leads isn’t selling, so the more time he spends searching for people to make an appointment with, the less time he spends on making the presentations. This again is part of a balancing act.

Unless that is, there’s nothing else that he can do at that time. If he’s between meetings or 120 miles from the office at 3.00pm, the options are simple, have a coffee, drive home or do some prospecting work. If he’s short of leads on a planning day, then the opportunities should have been created in last weeks prospecting. There are no real excuses in sales! I used to generate around 25 prospective contacts a week. At least 5 of these would be turned into appointments. Those that didn’t want to see me were quickly identified and what’s more, they’d take my calls, so I wasn’t wasting time scheduling call-backs. The CRM system said that my conversion rate of prospecting leads to appointments was a good as for marketing leads as was the appointment to order ratio. The only reason I didn’t do more prospecting was the matter of balance – I’d be eating into presentation time or appointment making time.

If you push the argument for any single activity too far, you end up with an unsustainable position. Ask a salesman to prospect too much and they have no time to make presentations. If they are spending all their time in the field making high quality presentations to high quality prospects, then they don’t have time to make appointments to they couldn’t have got there in the first place! If you ship out appointment making to a third party, you’ll screw up many of the opportunities the leads represent and not make any inroads through prospecting. If marketing is expected to produce 100% of their leads, it is probably too costly and sales staff wasting referral and prospecting opportunities.

It comes down to a matter of balance and optimising sales activities to produce the greatest revenues whilst retaining the attractions and satisfaction inherent in the job remains one of the biggest challenges of sales management. In fact I think that I’ll post a question here about this question of balance and optimisation and see what the members make of it as a primary subject!

Best wishes


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions
 
Posted by: michael Accepted Answer
9/19/2006 6:04 PM (CST)
Definitely the role of Sales. One could make the point that Sales could/should prospect for new markets and marketing would target that new market. But a sales person who waits for marketing to bring him/her new business (prospecting is about NEW business) is a drain on the payroll.

And yet, if you break the sales process down into:

Finding Prospects
Contacting Prospects
Closing Prospects...

It's possible to outsource the first 2 to a marketing company.


Michael
 
Posted by: micgamb Member Response
10/15/2007 5:16 AM (CST)
If you're salespeople aren't selling to qualified individuals then you have a marketing problem. Your company should be supplying all the leads necessary. Don't waste salespeople's time by trying to get them to find people to sale too. Some companies are not yet keen to this way of thinking and many salespeople need to find their own leads. For them I recommend courses like: http://www.coldcallcrusher.com

But companies that put their salespeople in front of qualified prospects who WANT to do business with them have the best chances. If you can't generate leads with your marketing then your marketing needs fixing. Try finding a direct response marketer and stay far away from traditional advertising companies that start their presentations off by talking about branding. Generating leads is essential and should be left to marketing. The prime reason is leverage because with marketing you can reach thousands at a time but with salespeople it'll be one-on-one usually.
 


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