This month, a marketing professor weighed in on an online debate I was following, over how aligned sales and marketing should be. He claimed that marketing should actually own sales, based on the fact that sales is simply the personal arm of the “promotion” P of the marketing mix.

To me, this debate goes right to the heart of the fact that there’s a fundamental misconception about whether lead nurturing in the high-value sales environment is something that marketing can do without sales involvement.

So many people talk about needing to align sales and marketing. Market what you’re selling. Sell what you’re marketing. Work together to define ‘leads’. Develop a proposition with sales…

Which is why it’s strange that marketing is so frightened ofhanding an ‘unready’ lead to sales. You can understand where the fear comes from: years of sales complaining (and then ignoring) as unqualified leads are tossed over the fence. So it may be a natural response that marketing shouldn’t be allowed to mention a lead to sales until the prospect has identified a budget and timescale for the decision.

What the smart companies are doing (at least, when it comes to complex high-value sales) is to realise that the answer isn’t either of these. Yes, lead nurturing is the future. But lead nurturing isn’t just about emails, webinars, phone calls, whitepapers, events. Sometimes, a meeting with a salesperson is actually the best nurturing tactic. We need to be careful to use the tactic sparingly, but once you say it, it sounds obvious: sometimes the best way to make a prospect ‘sales-ready’ is to actually have a salesperson meet them. Marketing can still own the relationship with the prospect if there’s no immediate action out of the meeting, but 9 times out of 10 an initial meeting will drive the relationship forward and the prospect further down the sales funnel.

When we use this idea of an initial meeting as a call to action in a campaign (usually as a follow-up to other campaigns we’ve contacted a prospect with), it tends to be one of the most successful things we can do. The trick is to be very careful to show the value of the meeting, explain why it won’t be a ‘sales meeting’, and even to visualise the agenda we’ll be discussing in the session. When you put this alongside a personal approach to the right prospect and a carefully thought-through ‘provocation proposition’, that’s when the magic happens…