Industrial sales and marketing: why they have to run as one system

In most industrial businesses, marketing and sales are run as two different jobs, in two different places. Marketing lives in the website, the ads and the email tool. Sales lives in the quoting system, the inbox and the rep's head. The work that falls between them is where a lot of sales get lost, and in my view the fix is to run them as one system.

Why industrial sales and marketing drift apart

A technical sale takes time. A buyer reads your website, downloads a spec sheet, rings with questions, gets a quote, goes quiet for two months, and then orders, or doesn't. Marketing touches the start of that and sales touches the end, and because each side uses its own tools, neither sees the whole thing.

So marketing can't tell which campaigns led to orders, only which ones brought in enquiries. And sales can't tell what a buyer read or asked about before they rang. Each side ends up judging the other on half the picture, which is a big part of why sales and marketing so often feel like rivals.

Where the work falls through

There are four handovers where I'd look first.

The enquiry. A form comes in or the phone rings. Who owns it, and how fast do they reply? If the answer depends on who happened to see it, some enquiries will wait days.

The quote. It goes out, and then what? A quote with no follow-up plan is a hope. I've written about what unfollowed quotes cost.

The lost quote. When a buyer goes with someone else, that's usually the end of the record. But they'll be buying again in a year or five, and you know exactly what they needed. They belong back with marketing, on your regular emails, not forgotten.

The order. A won customer needs servicing, parts and the next machine. If nobody's job is to stay in touch, a competitor will.

What one system looks like

The fix is one record of each buyer that both sides use, from the first visit to the last order:

• Every enquiry is logged with where it came from, so you know which ad, search or show produced it.
• Quotes live in the same place, with a follow-up date and a person attached.
• Won and lost are recorded, with the reason, so marketing can see which sources lead to sales.
• Follow-up runs on its own where it can, like the reminder to chase a quote or the email to a lost buyer in six months, so it doesn't depend on someone remembering.

When that's in place, the questions that used to start arguments get answered with a report. Which shows paid for themselves? Which product pages bring in buyers who order? Which reps are drowning and which have room?

Do you need a big CRM for this?

You need one that does the whole job, from enquiry to quote to follow-up to invoice. A contact list with a sales pipeline bolted on won't. I'd rather a business ran on one system that does most of it automatically than on four tools nobody joins up. That's why we built our own, and it's worth considering a custom build if nothing off the shelf fits the way you sell.

For the marketing side of the picture, I've written a fuller guide to industrial marketing. And if you'd like to see what one system could look like in your business, that's what our CRM and follow-up work is.

How we help with this: CRM and follow-up →