Sales and marketing misalignment is responsible for 10% or more revenue loss for B2B companies each year.
The sales team and marketing team of your company aim to increase your sales and revenue, so it only makes sense that they work together and stay connected via software and mobile apps.
The main issue with misaligned sales and marketing teams is that a lot of time and resources get invested in creating content that has no clear objective.
A whopping 60-70% of created B2B content never gets used because it's not relevant to the target audience. A documented content marketing strategy helps align teams around a common goal and allows them to figure out which type of content to create.
In this blog, I'm going to write about the best methods you can use to align the sales and marketing teams of your company as a sales manager so that you can achieve the best results.
Involve sales team in creating marketing message
If your marketing department is used to problem-solving or generating ideas on its own, it may be time to start including your sales team.
Salespeople deal with customers firsthand, and they may have ideas that the marketing department may not have considered. There are several strategies you could use to come up with your marketing message.
First, test different messages and copy in your email templates for marketing and sales. This way you can decide what tone works and what doesn't with hard data like open rates and CTR.
Also, be sure to maximize email deliverability, as according to research, one of five emails never reach the prospect’s inbox. There are different ways to improve this, but the first step I recommend is requiring a subscription confirmation to ensure emails being provided are real.
My favorite strategy for involving sales and marketing together is to build custom landing pages as a team. Why? Because marketing is great at explaining a product and why you need it, but sales is better at convincing people to close.
When building a sales and marketing aligned landing page, there are a few key elements you must hit, according to the experts at Website Setup, who provide this infographic showcasing each essential feature:
First, start with a strong summary. This is where you can lean on the marketing department to help describe and market the product and brand.
Next, for your call to action, leverage the sales team and its closing tactics to formulate copy that drives action. When it comes to social proof, gather sales examples and case studies to bolster your offer and appeal to more prospects.
As you can see, creating these landing pages to sell more involves sales and marketing to find success.
Align on KPIs
Another significant challenge in aligning sales and marketing is that each department’s performance is measured differently.
For instance, a sales team’s performance could be measured by the number of new accounts secured, direct profit margins, the number of deals closed, sales commission generated, or contract extensions.
A marketing team’s performance, on the other hand, can be measured by the number of leads and the quality of those leads, improving company culture, and also brand recognition.
Take for example, a brand like Monday.com, which is a popular agile project management tool:
If you’re in the digital world, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it. Just remember how much easier it is to sell and position an established brand than it is a start-up. Needless to say, brand recognition will be crucial amongst buzzing start-ups.
As you can guess, these different KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) must coincide. This will help sales and marketing teams work toward the same goals and will allow you to analyze your sales and marketing performance as a whole.
Set up more frequent calendar meetings between marketing and sales teams so that you can chart realistic goals for them.
If you want to get very creative, consider having a member from the sales and marketing teams use tools to host a webinar together so that both sides have a chance to use their creativity and resourcefulness.
Start tracking your marketing efforts based on their influence on the revenue alone. Instead of just measuring the number of leads they generate, they need to look at the sales funnel holistically.
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Understand lead scoring
68% of sales and marketing team members say that lead scoring is highly effective. Why? Because it dramatically improves customer loyalty.
Lead scoring is a technique used by businesses to rank their leads in terms of perceived value. This helps sales and marketing teams to determine which leads are significant to the company’s revenue generation and are worth pursuing.
Typically, a lead scoring system assigns a point score to each lead or customer depending on his or her actions. This helps the team know how close a potential customer is to making a purchase or closing a deal. Plus, it can be done inside Keap’s Infusionsoft (win-win!).
Lead scoring is known to increase closing rates by 30%, but only if the sales and marketing teams can collaborate their efforts successfully.
Sales teams can tell you what action greatly influences a customer to move through the sales funnel. For instance, maybe a customer makes a purchase sooner when he or she downloads an ebook or reads a certain blog post. This can help you determine where to put in more effort in your content marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Customers are becoming more complex in terms of their buying behavior, and this poses challenges to businesses. To overcome this, sales and marketing teams should find ways to work better together using team communication tools to achieve common goals.
Members of your sales and marketing departments should work together by determining a buyer persona and crafting a marketing message for the company.
Aligning the KPIs of both teams will help streamline efforts and improve results.
Lead scoring, if done properly and regularly, will allow sales and marketing teams to identify the most valuable leads and invest more in them to gently nudge them down the sales funnel.
When the sales and marketing teams join hands and pursue the same goals despite their differences, your company’s revenue will automatically grow. What’s more, this will greatly minimize wasted efforts and unnecessary costs.
Thus, sales and marketing alignment should be the top priority while running your business, and the two departments shouldn't be treated as disconnected entities.
