Skyrocket your business success with aligned sales and marketing tactics
You know there’s a divide between your sales and marketing teams, but you know you can fix this with an integrated approach. Not only will you be more likely to win higher value clients and increase your revenue, but you’ll have a greater insight into your target market and support better engagement between your sales and marketing teams.
To kickstart your business’ sales and marketing alignment, here are the tips and tricks we’ve used for our own sales and marketing alignment, as well as observations from many other businesses.
What to expect from an integrated approach
Sales and marketing teams work in silos tend to execute their own activities. This can result in a fragmented experience for prospects, making it extremely difficult to pinpoint where exactly leads drop off along the customer journey.
When sales and marketing interact and brainstorm regularly, they can join forces to amplify the impacts of their efforts. In our research, 70% of respondents said sales and marketing collaboration delivers a better buying experience for the customer.
Think of your integrated teams as a well-oiled machine who, together, can:
● Launch campaigns designed for maximum impact
● Handle leads fluidly
● Engage prospects and wow potential buyers
● Respond with agility and work in unison if market dynamics shift
● Capitalise on the opportunities generated
● Deliver and achieve much better commercial outcomes
With a holistic view of the buyer journey, marketing and sales will have a much more realistic understanding of the prospect’s experience. This will allow them to more confidently define and execute campaigns designed to trigger and increase engagement.
This bigger picture thinking should also be applied to generating revenue. That way, your teams will be able to work together to form and launch campaigns aimed at achieving that goal. By harnessing a wealth of insights and efficiencies from the alignment, marketing and sales will be able to further refine and improve a high-level business strategy for growth.
How to integrate your sales and marketing
1. Choose the right sales and marketing automation and reporting tools
Automation and reporting tools are designed to streamline your sales and marketing processes, helping you save time and money, while boosting your efficiencies. With your teams’ time freed up, they can focus more on your overall strategy and nurture promising leads.
An example of a well-known sales and marketing tool is HubSpot, which helps centralise your technology. The platform offers a full suite of products designed to turn your outbound leads into inbound ones. On a Starter package, you can access a wealth of free tools, as well as simple automation, conversion routing, task queues and email support.
With a Professional Plan, you’ll get all of this plus marketing automation, goal-based nurturing and custom workflows. You’ll also have access to Salesforce integration, smart content, attribution reporting, A/B testing for CTAs and A/B testing for emails.
Other highly praised automation tools for B2B businesses include Pardot by Salesforce, Constant Contact and Sendinblue.
2. Invest in strong leadership
Marketing and sales need a leader who can actively help ensure the success of their alignment. Business leaders and senior management can encourage desirable behaviour across these teams through continued communication about the benefits of an aligned approach, dedicated resources to maintain this and initiatives to break down departmental silos.
3. Check in regularly as one team
When marketing and sales openly share valuable insights about prospects on their buying journey, your teams can work towards higher conversion and win rates. This is because they’ll be better positioned to identify and engage with promising potential customers.
With key customer insights from sales, you’ll find that marketing would do a better job of raising awareness and educating your target audience, passing better qualified leads over to sales. Your sales team would understand how marketing has driven the lead and have a clearer strategy going forwards of their involvement to move the prospect closer to the point of sale.
4. Work together to drive quality leads
Closing a sale is a shared responsibility. Your teams need to work towards the end goal of getting higher quality leads to enable high-profit sales at an increased rate.
You’ll want to create a detailed lead record to help sales teams accurately route leads and spend less time figuring out which ones to prioritise. Before this, you’ll need to have clearly defined your lead scoring metrics, so sales and marketing know exactly how leads are ranked:
● EIs (expressions of interest – marketing leads)
● MQLs (marketing qualified leads)
● SALs (sales accepted leads – workable opportunities)
5. Set shared goals
Once you’ve formalised key lead generation metrics on lead scoring, your company will be ready to set goals with key performance indicators (KPIs). These are tangible benchmarks designed to help you measure your progress towards an objective. A marketing KPI could be to recruit key accounts that deliver significant lifetime value.
You can also create overarching OKRs (objectives and key results), which will help your sales and marketing teams to align their work to a common goal. An example of this is to manage YoY sustainable growth, without putting the core business at risk.
6. Report on revenue
You should replace your sales funnel with a revenue cycle, so you can understand how marketing and sales contribute to revenue. Your marketing and sales teams need to report back on revenue, rather than the leads themselves. To increase your revenue opportunity, you want to aim to win clients with high lifetime value (LTV), as these will provide you with revenue YoY, rather than through a single transaction.
7. Create content for the whole funnel
It helps to break the content marketing funnel into three parts, in line with your business goals:
• Top of the funnel (TOFU): attract attention
• Middle of the funnel (MOFU): generates leads
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): drives conversions
Your top of the funnel content is the start of the buyer journey and your goal is to answer your prospects’ questions, educate them and gently introduce them to your brand. Research from Semrush found that the most effective types of content to attract traffic includes: how-to guides, landing pages, infographics, checklists and e-books / white papers.
In the middle of the funnel, the number of people interacting with your content slightly shrinks. However, the ones who stay are typically more willing to engage with your content. Here, you want to give your prospect an in-depth understanding of how your solution helps their problem. The type of content you’re looking to create are: ‘how-to’ guides, product overviews, case studies, landing pages and webinars.
Last but not least is the bottom of the funnel, where you want to position your business as superior to its competitors, build trust and accelerate the prospect to purchase. You can do this with the following types of content: product overviews, customer reviews and success stories.
8. Use sales insights from closed sales
When marketing and sales work collaboratively, they can integrate their systems to share and respond to customer data. With enhanced access to customer information, it will be easier for the right people within your teams to act only when the prospect is ready to purchase, and contact them via their preferred method.
Key takeaways
To recap, here’s a breakdown of tactics to get your sales and marketing teams working in perfect harmony:
• When sales and marketing interact and brainstorm regularly, they can join forces to amplify the impacts of their efforts. This is known as sales and marketing alignment.
• Streamline your sales and marketing with automation and reporting tools such as HubSpot, Pardot by Sales Force, Constant Contact and Sendinblue.
• Your business’ leadership can dedicate resources and launch initiatives to encourages the success of the alignment.
• Your sales and marketing teams need to acknowledge that closing a sale is a shared responsibility. With a detailed lead record and clear lead scoring metrics, you can actively route leads and instinctively know which ones to prioritise.
• Use key performance indicators (KPIs) and overarching objectives and key results (OKRs) to set goals together.
• Report back on revenue, rather than the leads themselves. That way, your teams will understand how marketing and sales each contribute to revenue.
• Create content for the whole funnel, the top when you’re looking to attract attention, the middle to generate leads and the bottom to close the sale.
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.