The FT’s wonderful Lucy Kellaway recently wrote about how the odd white lie can be a useful thing and, in general, I think there’s something to be said for the “occasional bromide” to make the days pass more smoothly.  But that got me thinking about instances where these kinds of social niceties might be causing real damage.

Specifically, I’m thinking about the white lies we tell ourselves concerning the desirability of Marketing generating leads for Sales.   As part of our current research about gaining commercial alignment, we asked sales and marketing executives to force-rank their priorities.  Somewhat surprisingly, ‘lead generation’ appears toward the end of that list, with sales executives ranking it as an even lower priority than their marketing counterparts.

Now this may be an indictment on the quality of the leads.  But in this day of LinkedIn, Jigsaw and any number of networking applications showing you exactly where people work, I wonder if we’ve set the bar too low.  The challenge for marketers and account managers is around generating introductions – nobody continues to simply need a list of prospects.

The bar for an introduction is much, much higher and requires some real commitment on the prospect’s part.  The willingness to take a quick call is, in and of itself, a pretty good qualifier for a prospect.  Refocusing the commercial organization to think about introductions has some major implications:

1)      For Account Management, the level of collaboration with the sales organization just went up. This doesn’t just pre-qualify the leads; it also allows management to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of who actually contributed to a new sale.  For example, many companies find themselves not wanting to pay out multiple sweeteners to all the people who flagged the obviously attractive prospects.  Requiring an introduction would probably solve that particular problem.

2)      For Marketing, the type of activity likely changes.  Instead of optimizing for reach, marketers should optimize for higher bandwidth channels that allow for a two-way communication. So, more emphasis on spending time with customers and a re-prioritization toward higher impact channels such as conferences and user groups.

3)      And for Sales, well, it’s very hard to turn down a first invitation to speak with someone. Chances are, not all of these introductions will work out, but this should mean that the sales organization is much less likely to simply throw out everything.

MLC members: take the commercial integration diagnostic to see how well your sales and marketing priorities align.

Related posts:

1. The Lead That Got Away
2. Getting Sales and Marketing on the Same Page
3. 2010: Year of the Re-Org
4. Marketing’s Role in Support of Successful Rep Activities
5. Improve Message Consistency In Just 3 Steps