The Critical Role of Sales Development in Inbound Marketing

听起来很有希望。创建引人注目的内容（一致）。分享并推广内容。潜在客户参与，下载东西并成为合格的潜在客户。

这些线索传递给了销售团队，销售团队立即伸出援手，并立即受到前景世界的欢迎。会议迅速变成了真正的销售机会。要求提出建议，立即采取行动并提出销售。

The answer to the question is a qualified, “Yes.”Inbound marketing is instrumental in building predictable, sustainable and scalable sales growth, but it does not solve the entire problem.

潜在客户和销售之间的鸿沟

销售和营销之间存在着鸿沟。虽然有效inbound marketing does drive a higher volume of leads and qualified leads，这并不意味着这些潜在客户在创建时就已经准备好了。

Additionally, the very nature of inbound means that many of the leads you create, while qualified, won’t naturally move into a buying cycle with you. Gleastner Research identified that as many as80% of the leads you create are caused because someone was looking for valuable content to answer a questionor to solve a problem… not because they wanted to buy something.

是什么让鸿沟如此令人讨厌的是,除非你have the right tools in place to manage and measure it, it is invisible to most executives. They can see that leads are being created, and they can see that the investment isn’t translating into high volume sales success. The phenomena is the primary reason that research done by CEB found that销售和营销专业人员在一项学科中使用的单词中有87％用于描述另一个学科是负面的。

这种鸿沟有两个不利的后果：

• 营销功能通常被低估（甚至被忽视），推迟在案例研究，贸易展览会上工作，并“arts and crafts。”
• 销售团队的重量和压力太大。几年前，当时的前景需要与销售人员交谈，报价之间的差异很明显，生活更为简单。如今，销售世界太复杂了，无法独自留给销售团队。

销售开发是答案

这是关于入站线索的真相：他们还没有准备好购买。我最近听说有人将入站营销的价值描述为：

Rather than you having to go out and interrupt people with your message, the people who you want to do business with will find you. Because they download something you know they’re interested and they’re highly likely to buy from you.

The only truthful part of that statement is the first sentence. Inbound means you can stop using interruption as your primary lead generation tactic. But, the vast majority of inbound leads are not ready to buy, and when they get turned over to the sales team as if they are, bad things happen.

销售量development is the discipline that ensures that leads (of all types) are managed effectively. Your sales team stays focused on their highest value actions – managing and winning new sales.

What is sales development?Trish Bertuzzi，桥梁集团的发现，将其定义为the combination of data analysis tools, email nurturing and phone prospecting teams in a specialized role that is exclusively focused on creating sales qualified leads and preparing them for new sales people.

销售开发纪律是确保营销和销售之间保持一致的缺失作品。通过正确管理营销合格的潜在客户（MQLS），并给予个性化的关注，以通过漏斗来移动潜在客户以最大程度地提高转换机会，销售开发弥补了鸿沟。

需要第三学科

销售开发和入站营销是（或应该是）亲切的精神。他们都依靠数据，过程和清晰度来成功。他们是设计的work the way customers manage decisions todayand reinforce one another.

I’m often asked which function should be in charge of sales development and my answer is neither sales nor marketing. Instead the third discipline of Sales Development should get its own leader.

In my experience, the challenge is that both the inbound and sales development functions fall between the disciplines of sales and marketing. What typically happens is that inbound falls under the marketing department because it has the word “marketing” in it, and sales development falls under sales’ umbrella for the same reason.

问题在于，本来应该创建的一致性随着分裂而分裂，在大多数组织中，功能在“核心”营销或销售问题上发挥了次要作用。

Certainly both marketing and sales have responsibility for revenue growth. However they approach the issue from very different mindsets. Marketing tends to view things from a long-term, rules driven mindset; while sales tends to view the world from a shorter-term, opportunistic perspective. Managed effectively, this creates great opportunity.

销售开发的观点（我认为入站是一个子集）创造了一个completely different mindset。The sole focus of sales development is generating an increasing flow of qualified leads, and nurturing and preparing those leads for sales as quickly and effectively as possible. Marketing has more on its plate than just generating leads, and sales must be maniacally focused on “hitting the number.”

Companies that raise the sales development discipline to the same level as marketing and sales gain a tremendous advantage over those companies that don’t. They gain greater traction, learn and evolve faster and sustain faster growth rates.