In most businesses if you asked the Sales team what they want from Marketing, they will immediately say, “Better quality Leads”. And if you’d ask the Marketing team what they’d like from Sales, they might go, “We wish the Sales team could invest more effort on following up and converting the Leads”.
Now, that’s quite a ‘disconnect’ between the two core teams in a company, when ironically both are driven by their prowess to communicate and apparently strive for a similar goal - To bring revenue for the company.
This ‘Misalignment’ between Sales and Marketing is resulting in decreased sales productivity and wasted marketing efforts – which costs businesses around the globe a staggering one Trillion dollars per year.
And despite the disruptions in intelligent software with advanced marketing and sales automation tools and strategies, the marketing/sales divide still remains – resulting in poor performance at the bottom of the Sales funnel.
On the contrary, if you geared up to effectively align your ‘siloed’ Sales and Marketing team, you would achieve 208% higher marketing revenue than organisations with disjointed teams.
How can we then get over this ‘silo’ mentality and find the ‘sweet spot’ where both Sales and Marketing teams can be more aligned, more in tune with each other's messaging, metrics and strategy – to acquire more customers and improve revenue?
Here are 3 easy ways you can implement to make that ‘Sales-Marketing Alignment’ for increased revenue:
1. Involve Sales in Content Strategy and Content Creation
The Sales team is clearly the ‘face’ of your company or your brand. Unlike Marketing teams, they interact with the prospects and customers on a regular basis, discover their needs and answer their queries.
A Sales Rep understands your prospects or buyer personas very closely, their pain points, their aspirations and their behaviour. Involving the Sales team with every aspect of Content Creation and Content Strategy is clearly a ‘no brainer’ – as it brings more clarity and focus to the message you’re giving to your audiences. The Sales team is better equipped to assess and define the User Personas and suggest the consumption trends of the market, because they venture out in the field and engage more with the prospects.
It's due to incoherence in the content created, with respect to the targeted audience - that 65% of Sales reps say they can’t find content to send to prospects.
A Sales Rep needs to conduct high-value conversations with the prospects, provide answers to their questions and tailor content to meet their needs in every stage of the buying cycle.
It's essential they are well acquainted with the bigger picture of Content Strategy. A useful practice is to involve the Sales team in the initial briefing sessions to share, learn and collect their insights, when devising such strategies. After which a periodic exchange of ideas throughout the development stage should be adequate in ensuring the messages are relevant and of value to the audience.
2. Foster a ‘Collaborative Culture’ Between Teams
It's important the Sales and Marketing team each develop a culture of collaboration, through regular discussion, the sharing of ideas and to always be on the same page when it comes to Customer Engagement.
A purposeful, weekly collaborative session can be conducted to gain feedback and brainstorm on lead quality, product updates, marketing campaigns, etc., and the same can be collected on a shared document (i.e. Google Docs) to change and discuss as required.
Shared documents can also be used for the Sales team to add ideas or valuable references required for content creation. A consistent practice by both teams to contribute and share the conversations about the ‘customer’ will help define how the ideal prospects behave, what they look like, and which actions should trigger conversions through the stages of the funnel.
However, to support such collaboration and implement other functionalities like tracking buyer behavior and lead scoring, you need to work with a robust marketing stack, like a Content Management System, which integrates Social Media, Email Marketing, Lead Management, CRM and other online advertising systems. The other platform worth investing would be the one that connects Marketing and Sales content.
Another way to increase collaboration is to make all email exchanges between prospects and Sales accessible to Marketing. This help them to go through the email conversations, get a sense of the range of issues the prospects face and understand how Sales answers prospects’ questions.
Such insights can be used to enhance and nurture programs, increase Sales’ responsiveness through templates, and provide training to those in need to foster effectiveness.
3. Agree on Qualifying Criteria – Lead Scoring
A crucial factor that determines growth in sales for any organisation, is the understanding of what constitutes as a ‘Qualified Lead’. When everyone in your target market is not your ideal User persona, it's important for the Marketing team to know how the team defines ‘qualified’, before they go ahead with pushing referral leads to the Sales team.
Yet only 51.3 percent of companies have created a formal definition of a “qualified lead and quite obviously 61.7 percent of salespeople say the quality of marketing leads “needs improvement.”
If the marketing’s perception of ‘sales ready’, doesn’t match the Sales idea of ‘sales ready’ then that calls for a disaster, as it invites lots of missed opportunities for businesses with failed conversions and improper crediting of leads.
The Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a lead which the Marketing team sees as ‘good enough’ for Sales, and passes it on to the Sales team. The leads are scored as per a defined criteria that looks into the lead’s level of interaction with ‘content’, the ‘buying intent’ and other purchase indicators.
The Marketing team passes the MQL to the Sales Reps or the SDR (Sales Development Reps) who will decide which leads are to be submitted to the Account Executives. These are called the Sales Qualified Leads (SQL), which stand the highest chance to convert as a customer.
As explained above, by providing the Sales team with the ‘story’ of the Qualified Leads, their journey through the buying cycle and the scored ranks will help Sales Reps to formulate their conversations, sales pitches and approaches with the leads, at the time of contact.To Sum It Up…
At the end of the day, Marketing and Sales Alignment is about finding the true picture of our prospects/customers, and working in unison (not in silos), to provide better value to them through our products and services!
If you'd like more assistance with your sales/lead generaton or would like to discuss anything covered today, we'd love to hear from you.
Call Andy Fox (me) on (03) 5249 5570 or email andy@element7digital.com.au
Our Website is element7digital.com.au
