Everything you need to know about the marketing and sales divide.
Do you ever feel as though your sales and marketing teams resemble opposing sides in a football match, rather than teammates? Everyone is pursuing the same goals – qualified leads and conversions to sales – yet the two teams deploy completely different strategies and tactics to achieve these.
What this means is that your sales and marketing teams are working in silo, when they should be working in alignment as part of one bigger, seamless process. This is vital for B2B companies that sell complex products to committees of decision makers over an extended timeframe.
When your sales and marketing teams work in alignment, closing a sale is no longer a painful process. In actual fact, your teams will work better together towards the end goal of achieving higher quality leads to enable high-profit sales at an increased rate.
In this guide, we’ll dive deeper into the marketing and sales divide and offer practical advice about how you can bridge the gap between your teams and what this will mean for your business’ success.
What is the marketing and sales divide?
Historically, marketing and sales have worked in silos and developed independently. They’ve previously sat in separate offices, used different technologies and worked towards their own goals.
The more your marketing and sales teams work independently of one another, the more likely it is that they aren’t sharing insights or collaborating to drive the best quality leads. As a result, your sales and marketing processes and workflows aren’t clear, communication between the teams is poor and collaboration is non-existent. Put simply, your teams can’t work towards helping one another (or themselves) to achieve success if they continue to work in this way.
How does this translate to buyers, leads and the sales funnel? You may recognise several of these scenarios:
- Low quality leads are being passed between your sales and marketing teams.
- Vital lead information is being missed.
- Your teams don’t understand what the other is doing to drive, nurture and convert new leads.
Siloed sales and marketing is common for many B2B organisations.
As high as 90% of sales and marketing professionals point to multiple disconnects across strategy, process, content, and culture (LinkedIn, 2020).
Many B2B marketers will pass their leads to sales, and never see or hear of these again. Or, marketers will be able to track the volume of leads they’re generating, but struggle to understand which ones become revenue.
According to Reachforce, sales reps ignore up to 50% of marketing leads and instead, spend time prospecting their own leads.
How does an aligned sales and marketing approach work?
The truth is that closing a sale shouldn’t be a painful process. Rather than pushing and pulling in different directions, your marketing and sales teams should be working towards the same objectives. The process goes like this…
It all starts with marketing.
Before you can think about lead generation, your priority should be highly relevant and engaging marketing. Every marketing activity, from an email campaign and blog to organic social posts and paid ads, will simultaneously educate your target audience and raise your company’s profile.
With highly relevant and engaging marketing activity, your team can drive higher quality marketing leads (MLs) of prospects who want to engage with your business.
Before passing these to sales, marketing should whittle down their leads into a list of marketing qualified leads (MQLs), referring to prospects that the marketing team have pre-qualified and considers good potential buyers.
Sales can assess the lead quality on their side.
Before moving ahead, your sales team should evaluate the quality of the MQLs and whittle this list down to a select number of sales accepted leads (SALs). These are leads that the sales team acknowledges are worthwhile and have committed to act on.
Both teams report on revenue, then optimise activity.
Both your marketing and sales teams need to be reporting back on revenue, rather than the leads themselves. With marketing attribution tools such as X and Y, marketing can report on their revenue generated and optimise their future activity to drive more high-quality leads.
How will successful sales and marketing alignment benefit your business?
By working together as a well-oiled machine, your sales and marketing teams can help your business to achieve new levels of commercial success .
Simplified workflows.
When your marketing and sales work from the same technology and have total transparency, they can share insights, knowledge and data, as well as track the progression of leads as they move further down the funnel. With a more realistic view of the prospect’s experience, your teams will be able to more confidently define and execute campaigns designed to trigger and increase engagement.
A shortened sales cycle.
With buyers nowadays purposely delaying interactions with sales (they often ignore traditional tactics such as phone calls and emails), your marketing and sales teams need to work collaboratively to understand how to share the messages your customers want and in the way that they want it.
Increased revenue through marketing and clarity on ROI.
When your marketing and sales teams understand how their work directly impacts each other’s, your company can report on revenue and highlight ROI across the whole funnel – from the first marketing activity to the minute the sale closes.
Key takeaways.
Here’s what you want to remember about what the marketing and sales divide:
- The marketing and sales divide refers to your two teams working in silos, not sharing insights or collaborating to drive the best quality leads.
- This can result in low quality leads being passed between teams, vital lead information being missed, and your teams not understanding what one another is doing to drive, nurture and covert new leads.
- Your business requires an aligned approach, which starts with marketing producing relevant and engaging content to drive higher quality marketing leads (MLs) to sales.
- Marketing will whittle these down to a list of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) – prospects marketing has qualified and consider good potential buyers. Then sales will cut the list down further into sales accepted leads (SALs) – the leads they’ve committed to act on.
- Both teams can report on revenue generated, rather than the individual leads, and then optimise future activity.
- With an aligned sales and marketing approach, you’ll benefit from: simplified workflows, a shortened sales cycle, increased revenue through marketing, and clarity on ROI.
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You’ll gain access to a broad range of highly qualified and experienced marketing specialists, all of whom are experts in delivering commercial marketing for scale-up business. The big difference is that they’ll all work for you part-time, under contract – so you only pay for these experts as and when you need them.
Equals Five will help build and execute marketing strategies and programmes to not only meet your company’s goals, but deliver tangible business results too.
Are you ready to take a giant leap forward with your marketing?
If you’re ready to build your dream marketing team, and take a giant leap forward in the way you market and scale your business, then please get in touch for an informal chat on how we can help you achieve your aspirations for your business.