In another Marketing Tips blog post entitled, "Do Your Marketing And Sales People Get Along?" I made an argument for why companies should rely on marketing to do the heavy lifting in the sales process. To sum it up, why would you send your sales force to battle with pea-shooters when you could give them automatic weapons?

The answer is that you wouldn't, unless, of course, all you knew how to operate was a pea- shooter. No matter what you are using now, a pea-shooter or an automatic, there's always room to raise the bar, agreed? To help you do that, here are four questions you can use to

jump-start the process:

Question 1: How do you generate and measure leads, one at a time or in bunches?

Question 2: What formats of preformatted information do you use to educate customers and prospects?

Question 3: Once a prospect raises their hand and says, "Here I am, and I'm thinking about buying what you are selling," what happens next?

Question 4: Which statement best describes the way your sales people are trained:

A) Do your best to qualify the customer, and then figure out what we can sell them; Or B) Let the marketing system qualify and educate the prospect about what the options are, and then you'll spend more time closing the sale.

When you dig into this a bit more, chances are you'll spot some opportunities that will help make the sales challenge a litlle less challenging and lot more profitable.