Magnus Marketing Blog

So, who should run lead generation? Sales or Marketing. I agree with the perspective of the author, neither - it should have its own VP and be a separate group. The Customer Collective post discusses where an inside sales, sales support/research, type group should report. It found that 74% report to sales, the remainder to marketing, and in some cases - had a dedicated Director or VP.

Structuring a lead generation group as an inside sales and market development (ISMD) organization, with researchers, responsible for field marketing support is exactly the right structure. In fact, this is exactly what my role and team was comprised of at Hexaware Technologies. My group ran the North American marketing activities, supported the U.S/Canadian field sales force, and managed all the leads centrally. It was a great mechanism that worked well.

Marketing is a discipline focused on branding, awareness, and basic or what I term, unqualified lead generation. Leads or more aptly - inquries of interest are generated here. I believe Marketing should actually report to the "lead generation" group Director - as this group has all the information to drive more customer focused messaging and understands what an actual LEAD is.

Sales focuses on closing the business, managing the customers, and making the deals. No sales guy should be spending his time doing massive amounts of prospect research, cold calling (while ignoring or not building leads to close), or ignoring client needs. The ISMD group is the one charged with field sales support and core lead nurturing.

If an ISMD group has to report to marketing, either the Marketing Director has to have some type of actual phone or new business development experience OR the products/services need to be: 1) easily understood, 2) short sales process, 3) able to be quickly qualified, or 4) consist mostly of inbound response activity or your typical "telemarketing". If the ISMD group has to report to sales, then 1) the sales cycle should be longer with a lot of team selling or back and forth, 2) they are a real sales support organization, and 3) consist of mostly outbound prospecting activity.

As I said before, this type of group should sit directly in-between: drive marketing activity - from messaging to what type of sales support material is needed and support sales in advancing the leads to close and providing nuturing and providing sales intelligence to drive company strategy. If I were to be hired or really engaged by a client, my role would be exactly that: VP Inside Sales or VP Marketing/Business Development. More firms really should consider creating an integrative and more consultative role within their companies, in fact, this is a nice new path for all those MBA's shut out of the financial industry - business analysis, sales skills, and leadership....definitely a moneymaker.