Sales and marketing have traditionally operated in separate bubbles. However your sales and marketing teams should be reading from the same page or you’ll likely sacrifice efficiency, growth and revenue.
So, what’s the secret to aligning sales and marketing for increased sales conversions?
Check-put these five points:
1. Get Buy-In
Sales and marketing don’t always work together. Heck, sometimes they hardly understand one another. Sales tends to operate in the moment, pushing to meet monthly and quarterly quotas. Alternatively, marketing often plays the long game, building and nurturing relationships for the future.
Bring these two (sometimes warring) factions together by engaging the top performers — and influencers — in each department. Once you’ve gotten respected cultural leaders to buy into your plan for alignment, the rest will surely follow.
2. Meet and Communicate Frequently
The easiest way to get sales and marketing to function in tandem is to get them communicating often. This makes it easier to address questions and concerns, share processes, reinforce best practices and take brainstorming to the next level. Plus it builds familiarity and gives your teams a chance to bond over the business at hand.
And don’t underestimate the power of that bond. When people respect and care for each other, they’re more engaged and supportive, and they’ll recognize how important their unique contribution is to the success of their teammates and the project as a whole.
3. Define Sales and Marketing Terms
If a qualified lead means “A” to sales and “B” to marketing, inevitable confusion and frustration will follow.
Get your sales and marketing teams collaborating on strategic points, such as lead scoring. Having a mutual understanding of what makes a lead sales-ready will save reduce frustration and make the process more efficient.
Metrics, such as marketing qualified leads (MQLs), sales accepted leads (SALs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) should also be defined and agreed upon by both sales and marketing.
This allows you to address common sales and marketing scenarios with with service level agreements (SLAs) and clear instruction for follow-up.
4. Redefine the Sales Funnel
In the old days, marketing generated product awareness while sales educated prospects about products and services. Nowadays, customers educate themselves online long before they make official contact with your brand.
That means marketing, with the help of sales, should create content that assists and gently nudges prospects towards conversion, no matter where they are in the buying cycle.
5. Collaborate on Content
Sales deals first-hand with the questions and concerns of customers. They know what excites prospects and what scares them. This insight can be leveraged to better target your message and push prospects towards conversion.
Bonus Tip: Automate Lead Generation
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Learn how our Email Lead Generation software can save time and resources, qualify more leads and increase revenue.
