Sales Prospecting Framework: Marketing Team, Salesperson Competence, and Sales Structure.
| Autor | Vieira, Valter Afonso |
With changes in the business landscape in recent years due to social media sales, consumers' online purchases and in-store pick up, inbound marketing activities (Vieira, Almeida, Agnihotri, Silva, & Arunachalam, 2019), big data and analytics, and artificial intelligence, firms have embraced salespeople to truly engage with their customers. Salespeople employ sales knowledge and tactics to transform prospects into customers generating profitable customer relationships over the years. Industry reports have suggested that total spending on lead generation tools has increased worldwide and that sales supporting platform drives efficiency gains in sales activities; for example, Helsinki-based Leadfeeder raised [euro]3.1 million to automate lead generation (Loritz, 2019). According to Hubspot, about 50% of customers rely on customer references and industry reports to make purchase decisions, which enforces challenges for any prospecting effort (Davies, 2020). Firms then need to recognize the prominence of deploying marketing lead generation tools, working in teams, nurturing salespeople's competencies, and investing in sales structure. In the management domain, these business changes underlie our proposed sales prospecting framework that encompasses the following elements: marketing teams, salesperson competence, and sales structure.
Following sales literature, sales management refers to firm's sales operations that include managing salespeople and their managers, implementing technology tools to assist multiple activities, such as delivering, ordering, and managing customer account (Weitz & Bradford, 1999). As part of sales management, sales prospecting focuses on initiating and developing new lead and moving on to a qualified prospect, designing the sales proposal, dealing with objections, and closing the sales opportunity (Sabnis, Chatterjee, Grewal, & Lilien, 2013). By revising previous sales research and empirical evidence, we identified three key elements to propose the sales prospecting framework (Figure 1, Panel A). The three elements stress the importance of the marketing team (e.g., leads and sales plan), salesperson particular prospecting competence (e.g., individual and team competencies), and sales structure (e.g., sales platform, ERP, CRM, and firm process). Our ultimate goal is to present how these elements are important for sales prospecting and how they are related to sales performance.
While sales prospecting follows a course of action from the consumer's need to the marketing intelligence records, and from the salesperson-customer approach to firm processes and resources, there is a lack of comprehensive outlook on how sales prospecting develops because existing literature is disperse (Hartmann, Wieland, & Vargo, 2018). Moreover, few studies carefully accounted for an integrated view of marketing team effort toward sales prospecting, salesperson particular prospecting competence, and the fully deployed processes and resources in the sales structure. We surely take this unique opportunity to deepen our understanding on the sales prospecting framework, offering conceptual definitions of main elements, highlighting key studies, managerial implications, and gaps for further research in the field of management. We begin our discussion with prospecting driven marketing key roles of lead generation and sales planning (Cano, Carrillat, & Jaramillo, 2004). Next, we elaborate on salespersons competence and end with firm's sales structure (Figure 1, Panel A).
MARKETING TEAM
Prospecting marketing team manages lead generation, dissemination, and creation of market response to customer and competitor movements. Previous investigation found that this team influences long-term future shareholder returns and short-term return on assets (Feng, Morgan, & Rego, 2015) due to firm-level marketing capability (Morgan, Feng, & Whitler, 2018). According to Feng, Morgan, and Rego (2015), marketing team is accountable for developing two firm-level marketing capabilities--(a) build long run market-based assets, and (b) leverage these market-based assets in the short run to deliver cash-flows--, which in turn impacts shareholder returns and return on assets. Market-oriented firms benefit from a strong marketing function, but a powerful marketing team cannot compensate for low levels of firm's market orientation (Gotz, Hoelter, & Krafft, 2013). Firms have invested a large amount of money on customer orientation (e.g., Nike invested US$ 1.44 billion in 2018) in order to create marketing processes for supporting lead generation (i.e., identifying customers with interest or enquiries about products or services) and developing sales plans and ultimately increase firm profit.
When firms have a customer-oriented marketing team, they can identify new leads and aid qualify leads into prospect buyers leveraging salesperson competence, planning the sales approach, and using processes (Andzulis, Panagopoulos, & Rapp, 2012) and resources to ultimately convert them into loyal customers (Vieira, Faia, Boles, Marioti, & Pereira, 2019). The large marketing team in many firms is primarily responsible for the strategy of prospecting that may include numerous goals, for example, content creation, developing marketing tactics, planning the sales approach, selecting keywords in Google search, email marketing, defining investments in social media, and advertising in on- and off-line channels. Search engine optimization is a way for firms to effectively prospect customers and has become a very large market reaching over $80 billion according to Forbes (Voskresensky, 2019). However, the prospecting driven marketing effort needs to add key tasks to properly (a) generate leads and (b) develop sales planning to the individual salesperson and marketing teammates (Figure 1, Panel B-right).
First, lead generation encompasses sales funnel processes (Figure 1, Panel B-left) of discovering and developing awareness of potential buyers about products and services (Sabnis et al., 2013). Specialized digital agencies (e.g., ClickFunnels) help lead generation by implementing creative communication to drive product up- and cross-sell and one-time promotions. The marketing team often searches leads and adds them to the sales funnel for salespeople to take over and ascertain the real sales potential (Paschen, Wilson, & Ferreira, 2020). Salespeople can use their competence to appraise and qualify the sales lead and remove unpromising ones. Salespeople then can contact the qualified potential buyer to carry on a sales presentation using customized content (e.g., inbound marketing) by the marketing team aiming to increase purchase intention. When the potential buyer positively responds, salespeople move them down into the sales funnel system by opening a sales opportunity in the firm's records. Salespeople present to a potential buyer the sales proposal based on his/her particular demand, and eventually close the sales opportunity. This marketing-sales integrated process is assisted by the sales funnel process and system (Strong, 1925; Wiesel, Pauwels, & Arts, 2011). According to recent marketing-sales integration survey, 68% of respondent firms have neither clearly defined nor properly assessed their sales funnel, showing that 79% of marketing leads are never converted into customers (Schmitz, 2020).
Based on Figure 1 (see Panel B-right), research suggests that the use of marketing developed sales influences tactics in customer encounters to increase lead generation and qualification and facilitate the flow into the sales funnel (Poyry, Parvinen, & McFarland, 2017). By providing support for lead generation, the marketing team designs the first approach to potential customers (Capon, Farley, & Hoenig, 1990; Monteiro & Vieira, 2016), analyzing and selecting qualified leads, and then moving them to salesperson's CRM system (Bradford, Johnston, & Bellenger, 2016). The marketing team becomes responsible for guiding the business process, developing proposals, and ensuring the customer-centric orientation when managing customer leads through the sales funnel in the CRM system (Raman, Wittmann, & Rauseo, 2006).
By being customer-centric, marketing team facilitates the customer journey through a variety of touch...
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