6 WAYS TO ACHIEVE

SALES & MARKETING ALIGNMENT THROUGHOUT THE BUYER'S JOURNEY

only 8% of B2B companies have achieved effective sales and marketing alignment*.

Although department leaders believe there's much to be gained from teams working together to increase lead flow and generate revenue.

*According to a report by Forrester Research

why doesn't it happen?

impossible to achieve!they say…

Here are

6 ways to achieve

sales and marketing alignment

I say.

CREATE JOINT SALES AND MARKETING GOALSHelp each team understand exactly what is expected and hold them accountable to concrete, shared, numerical goals.

1

Calculate both the marketing and sales metrics and provide frequent reporting for each. Make sure you review your metrics and make them accessible to everyone to maintain transparency and improve communication between teams.

1

2

3

Lead Conversion Metrics:

• Lead to Contact % • Contact to Appointment Held % • Appointment to Close % • Lead Creation to Close Date

Sales Email Conversion Metrics:

• Send to Open % • Send to Click % • Send to Appt %

Here are some metrics you should be keeping track of:

CREATE JOINT SALES AND MARKETING GOALS1

Manage a Single Source Database2Use customer relationship management software that’s built on a single source database. or, at the very least, operates on a bi-directional integration to ensure salespeople and marketers know where prospects are in the sales cycle at all times. It's one of the things we like about HubSpot’s single source marketing and sales platform.

For bi-directional integration, look to integration tools like Bedrock Data.

Manage a Single Source Database2The most successful teams

manage leads by lead status and deal stages.

Here are some examples of the statuses and stages we help our clients implement and manage...

Lead Statuses: • Attempting to Contact • Contact Made • Appointment Scheduled • Appointment Held • Open Deal • Client • Partner • Send Back to Marketing • Unqualified • No Further Action

Deal Stages: • Discovery Meeting • Demo • Follow-up Appointments • Contracting & Negotiation • Closed Won • Closed Lost • Stalled

Align Content with the Sales Process3

Sales and marketing teams should collaborate on content creation

Salespeople can provide insights into any gaps in the current content arsenal. As Salesforce puts it, “sales leaders can serve as strategic advisors to content creators.” Over communicate about the

content being used and discuss the impact on customer engagement during sales interactions.

So Always be thoughtful and realistic about use cases.

you don’t want marketing wasting time crafting content for sales

that will go unused !

It takes a significant amount of time to create content

Align Content with the Sales Process3

Align Content with the Sales Process3To increase its effectiveness, ensure the content you’re creating aligns with the buyer’s journey and speaks to the awareness, consideration, and decision-making process

I need to increase traffic to my site

I can use inbound marketing. Who should I hire?

xoombi has competitive rates. I’ll give Doyle a call

awareness consideration Decision

Streamline Content Management4Content management is one of the biggest obstacles sales and marketing teams battle to overcome. Here are two of my favorite tools teams can leverage to effectively access and manage content:

WittyParrot: WittyParrot is also a great tool for manag ing approved content between marketing and sales for prospecting and responding to prospect questions and RFPs. It allows you to manage content centrally in the cloud and provides in-depth analytics.

Hubspot CRM: The Hubspot CRM helps you organize marketing collateral and sales messaging within the template builder and document management tool. You can use personalization tokens, track performance, including metrics for open rates, click throughs, and analytics on the documents prospects looked at.

Provide Cross-Functional Training5Train sales on marketing concepts and skill-sets that produce winning campaigns. Help salespeople understand how your company engages customers at different stages of the buyers journey. Conversely,

train marketers on selling concepts and skills salespeople use during each stage of the sales cycle, from prospecting and follow-up to closing.

Provide Cross-Functional Training5When both

sales and marketing understand the way each other thinks

and develop an understanding of the skills that make each other successful, teammates can learn to collaborate and leverage each other’s expertise to

win more new business.

Reward Your Team6Don’t reward each department individually. Instead, focus on what your sales and marketing teams accomplish together and reward them jointly. This will encourage more communication and collaboration between teams.

Some possible rewards include:

• Bonuses • Team retreats • Leadership opportunities • Paid time off • Gift certificates • Happy hour

The Changing Face of Sales and Marketing

By understanding the sales process and creating marketing campaigns that support it, customers advance more quickly through the sales process to help you close bigger deals faster.

working in alignment gives marketing and sales teams a significant advantage.

Sales-driven marketing puts egos aside and allows sales to drive the business forward with marketing providing support around the sales strategy.

Read the original article written by

ON

Doyle Slayton