I am a baseball fan. If you love baseball, you know that Spring Training for Major League Baseball started this past week. The season that every ball player hopes will end in late October (when the World Series is played) is just beginning. A long time ago, I coached my two sons’ baseball teams. Even longer ago, I was a player myself. I can tell you something that every player has to learn if they are going to be a great hitter: their success in driving a baseball is in how they follow through after their bat makes contact with the ball. If you stop your bat after you make contact, the ball will dribble a short distance. But if you swing the bat hard enough that it ends up behind your head, you can hit a ball a long way.

Follow-through is really important in the hand-off between marketing and sales. Marketing is given the task of catching the attention of would-be customers. Awareness marketing helps the consumer understand your brand and then begins to transition them to make an offer to buy your product and services. In other words, marketing produces leads that your sales staff can follow up to then close the deal. Just like hitting a baseball, that follow-through should happen in one smooth motion: catch the customer’s attention, give them a reason to try your product, make an offer, close the deal. However, too often this transition gets a bit choppy. Delays happen, and when they do, that potential customer loses interest.

I had lunch with a friend today and the topic of follow-through came up in our conversation. He said something rather profound. He commented that in many organizations, he has found that lack of follow-through is the norm, not the exception. In other words, he has found that most people responsible for making the next step in building a customer relationship don’t do so or are very late in their response to the point that they lose customers. There are CRM systems built around timely follow-up in converting prospects into customers. The technology is there, but, as he put it, the follow-through is lacking.

Why does it happen this way? There may be several reasons. I have found that a lot of sales reps are simply too busy to get to all of the leads that have been sent their way. This often happens when marketing has done a good job in a specific campaign, an event or a trade show where lots of people are responding and need a quick touch to keep them moving closer to a sale. Part of your marketing plan should include what to do when you are inundated with requests from prospects. But often there isn’t good follow-through because there are bad processes. Marketing stops short of generating leads because they never ask potential customers for their information. Sales never pick up the leads because they don’t think they have all the information they need to make the call. Those types of barriers need to be fixed to make marketing successful.

If you want to make your marketing more effective, take a close look at how this hand-off between marketing and sales is happening in your business. These are the sorts of smart marketing and sales decisions that don’t cost much to fix and will have a great impact on your bottom line.