How to align your sales and marketing teams.
Many businesses have fallen victim to a lack of sales and marketing alignment. That misalignment is costing businesses more than a trillion dollars per year! Ok, I may have made up that stat. But an actual stat (Source - SuperOffice) says that up to 60-70% of B2B content is not being used, and close to 75% of marketing leads never convert to a sale.
Does that sound familiar? It’s time to turn sales and marketing into “Smarketing.”
When sales and marketing are aligned, that can lead to a 32% increase year-over-year in revenue growth (Source - Aberdeen Group), 208% growth in Marketing revenue (Source - Wheelhouse Advisors), and 38% higher sales win rates (Source - MarketingProfs).
So how do you combine the teams for the greater good?
3 Ways to Align Sales & Marketing
We’ve seen it. Marketers spend countless hours and lots of money generating leads, but most of those leads are just trashed by sales. Sales immediately dismiss marketing leads as low-quality, and the blame lies with marketing for not generating quality leads. But it shouldn’t be all on the marketing team – maybe sales aren’t providing enough feedback, and now you’re going back and forth with no real solution.
But here are three ways to get sales and marketing to work together.
Empathy
Your sales and marketing teams should have each other’s back. They should be each other’s ride or die. So, start building a “best friend” relationship with each other. And it’s as simple as going for drinks, constantly communicating, sharing memes on Teams or Slack, etc.
Process
Develop a clear and repeatable process to ensure that everyone within both teams are pulling in the same direction and working in the same way. Reaching for the same goals.
Clarify three things: Lead scoring, lead generation metrics, and an SLA (service level agreement).
Lead scoring: This is the process of ranking leads to determine their “sales readiness”. How many times have you gained a subscriber and noticed a sales person tried to call or email the prospect immediately? When they weren’t ready. Losing them… forever. Implementing a CRM process that includes lead scoring based on the prospect’s interest they show in your business and the way they interact with your online content as well as their fit (do they fit the buyer’s persona?) will strengthen your revenue cycle. But it will only work if sales and marketing come together to define the lead scoring scorecard.
Lead Generation Metrics: Make sure you know what defines a proper lead for both departments.
A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a prospect that the marketing team has nurtured through the buyer’s journey with content and is considered a good potential buyer.
A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is a lead that the sales team acknowledges and is committed to act upon… aka… they’re ready to buy.
When both sales and marketing teams come together to outline what qualifies as an MQL or SQL, both teams are poised for greater efficiency.
Feedback
it’s essential for marketers to get a sense of what is working for sales. So, it’s important there’s a bit of a feedback loop between both teams to help optimize any processes you have in place.
Here’s an example: Sales can say to marketing “hey, we got a great customer from here, so how do we get more of those” and that helps marketers optimize for those channels. And vice versa “we’re getting some bad leads from here” so you can re-allocate your marketing budget to other channels that are working better.
The Sales and Marketing Mantra
Some say MANTRAS are fluffy. But they work. To help drive a culture where sales and marketing teams join forces for the greater good of the team, use the following mantra:
Marketers: Don’t think about generating leads. Think about generating quality leads that sales can convert.
Sales: Let your marketers generate demand. Share constant feedback with the team, so marketing can do what they do best.