Intuitively, we all know that when sales and marketing work well together companies see strong improvements on important performance metrics. Many companies, however, allow for their marketing and sales teams work as separate entities. THIS IS A HUGE MISSED OPPORTUNITY. According to Harvard Business Review sales cycle goes down, cost of sales decreases, and market-entry costs goes down. I would like to provide some pointers what every marketer can do with their campaigns to ensure their marketing efforts are tied into incremental sales revenue.
Defining The sales Funnel
It is important that the sales and marketing teams have regular touchpoint and make the initial collaboration for both teams to align on the sales funnel. Tackle each friction point collaborate and together decide how to reduce this friction. For example, did you know 80% of the content created by marketing goes unused by the sales team? Well it does, and the reason for this is the content is not aligned with any specific stage of the sales funnel as a result the sales team cannot use it. It is therefore imperative that the sales and marketing teams collaborate on a regular basis and come to a mutual understanding of how the sales funnel actually works in real time.
Define the Ideal Lead
It is estimated that 4 in 5 leads never convert, which is a problem for sales teams. The cause of this is no ones fault but just a lack of understanding around what makes a qualified lead. Marketing teams should have access to data that identifies shared traits in those that convert and those that don’t. Sales should provide the marketing team with anecdotal feedback on what is a good lead. Both teams have information and should get together and summarize their findings and come up with a shared definition of what an ideal lead looks like.
More times than not, marketing is wasting sales team’s time with too many poorly qualified leads. This is why it is so important for marketing to first understand what makes a good lead. Another prime example of a communication gap between sales and marketing are conflicting KPIs. Marketing departments may have targets of generating X amount of Marketing Qualified Leads per month however, that volume may be overwhelming for the sales team to handle. The solution to this is alignment with the timing of campaigns in order for the sales team to have bandwidth to work the leads through the sales funnel delivered by marketing.
Create Customer Persona
Companies that exceed their lead and revenue goals are twice more likely to have created customer personas than those that do not have personas. One key way of developing buyer personas is through pop up surveys, post purchase surveys, and online surveys. You can also arrange interviews with a handful of your best customers or invite them to take part of focus groups. Another way is to use the sales team who should have knowledge and information that is valuable for marketers. You can go as far as to ask your internal sales team to bring in information that they already have about your target customers and then merge both marketing and sales information to come up with a more accurate customer persona for your business.
The Ongoing Process – Collaboration
It is not only important but imperative for the heads of marketing and sales departments to have meetings, monthly or bi-weekly. During these meetings they can discuss what the plans are for the coming month, what results they saw previous month, and how both teams can collaborate to see even better results going forward.
Hosting brainstorming sessions with your internal marketing and sales teams is a great way to have these teams collaborate, just make sure you prepare for these meetings in advance to be productive.
These are just some ways to help your sales and marketing teams work together to capture more opportunity in your market and increase revenue and leads.
