We too often focus on new customer acquisition as our primary revenue growth strategy. However, in most circumstances, our most significant and fastest growth opportunities are sitting in our sales team’s CRM.

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This fact popped into my mind during a recent conversation with a SaaS, marketing director. We were discussing his last board meeting, and I was asking about priorities and objectives that came out of that meeting. He said that they had thrown him a bit of a curve ball because he was looking to present some free trial activation and customer retention strategies and they wanted him to focus exclusively on new customer acquisition.

My empathetic response was, “Shoot; they took away all the low hanging fruit.”

After doing lead generation for over fifteen years, there is one little secret that I try to leverage in every engagement — based on this elementary principle:

Sales teams are great at attacking live bait, while marketing is great at chumming.

(Sorry, Shark Week is coming up — I love Shark Week — and I couldn’t resist the analogy.)

This analogy means that Sales is excellent at going after and converting prospects that in the process of making a decision. Opportunities that have concluded that they have a pain point or need a better solution — leads that are Sales Qualified Leads (SQL).

Meanwhile, Marketing is excellent at building nurturing and awareness systems. These systems are lead nurturing campaigns that automate the process of staying in front of prospects that have shown some interest or should be interested, but haven’t engaged for a sales conversation — leads that are Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL).

Here in lies the opportunity. There is much fishing that can and should be done inside of the organization’s CRM. Prospects that have already been acquired, but haven’t engaged for a demo or sales conversation.

Marketing and Sales can both get significant KPI wins if they let Marketing get in there and build a simple lead nurturing system that runs against the organization’s CRM.

The details get a little more complicated as we get into discussions of systems you have and should have and how well they play together, but at the highest level, this is what most of my strategies leverage.

Sequences that are segmented and use a logical integration of emails, SMS (text messages), and ringless voicemails.

Curious about how this might work for your organization? Let’s talk — bill.rice@kaleidico.com.

Originally published on BillRice.com