Give credit where credit is due.
Or, as the kids say, game recognizes game. Whichever colloquialism you’d prefer, this principle is an important one in ensuring proper sales and marketing alignment. One source of tension that can throw that delicate balance and alignment out of whack is the allocation of proper credit when deals are closed, particularly on where that lead and opportunity came from in the first place. There are fields for sales reps to log lead lead sources and opportunity lead sources in Salesforce.com, depending on where the lead was derived from. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, this information is not always accurate in Salesforce reports.
It’s bad for your company’s business if the wrong departments are receiving undeserved credit. This can not only lead to upper management investing poorly – for example, pouring additional funding into a seemingly underperforming marketing department – but can also create bad blood between your sales and marketing teams.
Undeserved credit and erroneously sourced opportunities occur for several reasons. Perhaps your sales reps are ultra-aggressive and slightly disingenuous, and since they had several cold calls with this lead at some point in time (regardless of where its original source was from), logged it as such. They could be after the slightly higher commissions that come with cold-called deals, or are simply eager to receive the credit. Is your marketing team sloppy with entering lead source information? Is there no defined written system for logging and tracking such information? Maybe someone just made an honest mistake.
Whatever the reason is, the limitations of Salesforce.com reports make it difficult for sales managers to produce an opportunity source report and add lead sources to compare the accuracy of each one. Sales managers need a visual report that allows them to look at the bookings by lead lead source and the bookings by opportunity lead source to see if they match, before they can determine why such inaccuracies are taking place.
Look at the Bookings by Opportunity Lead Source report below. According to this information, taken from data logged in Salesforce.com, the most valuable deals closed this year were sourced directly from cold calls undertaken by your team of sales reps. Referrals, webinars, conferences and various marketing initiatives made up the rest of the deals that were closed. By looking at this report, sales managers would think that they had a team of proactive and gritty sales reps, constantly working the phones and going above and beyond to find great lead sources on their own volition.
The lead lead source table below tells a totally different story. According to this report, referrals accounted for the most valuable deals, followed by marketing-led webinars and conferences, with cold calls lurking somewhere in the middle. That fact that these two reports don’t match is a problem Somewhere in the journey from lead to closed deal, two different departments claimed credit for the same things, creating a lot of confusion and inaccurate Salesforce reports for sales managers to study.
The limitations of Salesforce reports makes it difficult for sales managers to quickly pull these two disparate reports for comparison’s and accuracy’s sake. Being able to visually compare these two different lead sources quickly will help managers ascertain the accuracy of lead sources logged in Salesforce.com. Having access to such reports, emphasizing the importance of data accuracy among your employees and implementing a culture that preaches a ‘One Team’ philosophy can help ensure complete sales and marketing alignment at your organization.
