Salespeople should not be prospecting!

Ask any salesperson about prospecting and most will tell you they hate it. Fact is most of them are horrible at it and would rather have a tooth removed than cold call. The truth is you need to prospect to grow. In this day and age that needs to fall on marketing if you want to scale.

The reason this needs to fall on marketing is due to the complexity of getting a prospect's attention. These decision makers are inundated with options and build their knowledge about products and services on their own. They do not need a sales person so they go to great lengths to block them until they are at a point where they are ready to make a decision. Since the gathering of information is now done by the prospect, marketing needs to drive the engagement.

The benefit is marketing's ability to scale and build a buying experience that is consistent and on message. Marketing's ability to articulate value and shape content that is relevant is much more effective than what can be communicated by different sales people. The consistency of being able to reach prospects across multiple channels ensures that the prospect will become aware quicker then the intermittent touch points of a sales person. And the ability to leverage automation and business intelligence tools leads to the optimization of lead development, delivering marketing qualified leads to sales.

This approach fundamentally alters the relationship between marketing and sales. Marketing today needs to do the prospecting, using engagement data and intent signals to track each prospect’s status in their buyer’s journey, and tailoring the messaging as the system “learns” more about their needs. Marketing automation, intelligently applied, can automatically score the value of each lead and determine when each prospect is ready to buy. Salespeople then take on a more consultative role, helping to answer the questions of prospects who are close to making a buying decision and closing them.

Not only that, but marketing automation tools, combined with a solid, multi-channel marketing strategy, enables you to create an always-on prospecting engine, finding an ongoing stream of potential buyers for your products and services and nurturing them through their self-education and selection process until they’re truly ready to talk to a salesperson.

In closing, salespeople should no longer be prospecting and cold calling. As we’ve seen, today’s sophisticated buyers don’t want to talk to a salesperson until much closer to the sale. Simply put, in today’s world, cold calling is never going to effectively generate the results needed to grow.