Know-How Exchange : Other

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).

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.

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.

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

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

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