Is Lack of Business Growth Sales or Marketing's Fault?

The business world can be a bit cutthroat at times – it’s only natural. When you’re dealing with large sums of money, the success or failure of a business, personal achievements, and people’s very livelihoods, pressure is going to be high. Everyone wants to take credit for the business’ achievements, while no one wants to be responsible for its failures.

It can get especially prickly when a business isn’t experiencing satisfactory growth. There can be plenty of finger pointing, and sales and marketing are usually the first to be blamed. Why? Because they’re responsible for new business. And if your company isn’t experiencing growth, that means new business has been unsatisfactory.

So whose fault is it if your business isn’t growing: sales or marketing? The truth is, both can easily be to blame, and it’s usually a joint effort. Sales and marketing have to work well together in order for a business to grow.

How can you tell which department needs to step up its game? Let’s go over the possibilities with both:

Marketing

Marketing functions a bit like an old school carnival barker: they yell at the top of their lungs, trying to attract as many visitors as possible. Marketing is responsible for attracting new visitors and turning those visitors into leads, so it’s easy to see when the department isn’t doing its job. If your traffic, leads and/or search results rankings are low, then marketing is to blame.

However, there’s more to marketing’s success than simple numbers. Marketing is also responsible for the content that appears on your site. This content must be both valuable and informative to potential customers, otherwise they won’t be willing to exchange their contact information for your content offers. And if they aren’t willing to do that, your leads will shrink up very quickly.

So how can you tell if your content is good enough? Lead numbers are a good place to start. You should also encourage your sales team to inquire about the content when they contact leads – ask for their opinion on the quality and helpfulness of the content.

Sales

Sales probably gets blamed a lot more often than marketing does, simply because they’re the last link in the chain. The sales team is responsible for turning those leads into purchases, and when the lead conversion rate is low, we naturally look to the sales department.

But it’s important to remember just how challenging sales can be. Even your best sales people are going to fail to close 80-90 percent of leads; it’s just the nature of the business. So how do you evaluate a department with a built-in 90 percent failure rate?

Monitoring your sales people is one way to accomplish this. Sit in on a few sales calls and examine how your salespeople interact with leads. Do they promote your business’ value? Are they effectively engaging with leads?

And although the number may be low, your lead conversion rate can still be eye-opening. The difference between a 5 percent lead conversion rate and a 2 percent conversion rate can be vast, especially if you have a large number of leads.