Control vs. Sales Effectiveness

Social computing in B2B companies will probably have the biggest impact on internal portals: Sales Portals, Customer Communities, Partner Extranets.  I say this, because Companies will have the most trouble with loosening the reins on control and an internal portal is still under their control - at least in theory.

On a post at Pacifica Group, Sridhar Ramanathan summarizes lead nurturing and handoff to sales, "Marketing must “nurture” the prospect along by providing increasingly more useful and enticing information. These communications should be based on the customer actions or interest. So a whitepaper download might trigger a webinar invitation on a related topic. Marketing must offer education and not appear as high pressure or “salesy” because that’s a turn-off at this stage. Our job is to make sure that, by the time an inside rep calls the prospect, the customer is open to having the conversation."

Which made me start thinking about what the sales team knows about how marketing is doing this? What kind of communication exists between Marketing and Sales?  Does Sales get input into how marketing is preparing leads for the handoff?  Does Marketing get input into how Sales moves forward with the conversation with the prospect?

I'm guessing, hmm, not always?  Or is it, not ever?  Or is it a list of meeting dates and which white papers the prospect has and which webinars they've attended with no context about the interactions?

Now think about some of the possibilities.

• What if your sales portal has an internal blog (maybe one per solution and/or one per industry) that allows marketing to post about interactions and sales to comment or post their thoughts about how they are seeing folks in the industry or who use the product solve challenges and be successful.  Right now.  And Marketing can pass that on in a context that's useful to the prospect.
• What if the blogs of interest to that sales person can be delivered to them by RSS feeds so they are in the loop, no matter where they are?
• How are you personalizing the prospect's experience at this stage?   Is your company building a relationship with the prospect that can be handed off seamlessly?  What if when it's time to hand off a prospect to a sales rep, the marketing rep makes the introduction by introducing the sales rep via email with a picture and a brief bio that personalizes the introduction?

I think it's a valid consideration to give the marketing and sales departments the freedom to interact and build relationships with each other in order to speed the sales process and increase effectiveness.

David Cowgill, in the post How to Retain Top Sales Talent, says, "Sales people will get re-energized when they see barriers and limitations to their effectiveness being addressed and eventually lifted. If the entire company is working towards the same objectives, sales people feel they have some control over their personal destiny."

So this is really about corporate culture.  Bottom line.  If you can't trust your departments to interact internally, what do you think the experience is from the outside looking in?  How is the level of control the company exercises affecting the abilty of marketing and sales to meet their goals?