TL;DR
– Share common objectives between marketing and sales via a clear formalized SLA
– Identify your IAPs and ICPs together to optimize targeting and qualification
– Establish a joint lead scoring strategy to prioritize hot prospects
– Analyze performing channels to focus efforts on best measured ROI
– Use ABM to combine marketing and sales strengths on strategic accounts
In companies where sales and marketing are not aligned, the conversion rate is logically lower.
Between unqualified leads and frustrated sales reps, it’s not easy to maintain harmony between two departments with traditionally distinct objectives.
Why align sales and marketing? What are the effective methods to get marketers and sales reps working together efficiently? How to end your siloed organization with LaGrowthMachine?
Discover all the keys you’ll need to break down the barriers that lock down your marketing and sales forces.
Why Align Sales and Marketing?
57% of respondents believe there is still a lot of work to be done to achieve alignment between sales and marketing departments.
In most companies, regardless of size, the coexistence between the marketing department and the sales department does not always go smoothly.
The former generally blames the latter for a lack of lead conversion, while the latter complains about the quality of prospects.
These behaviors are not encouraged by managers who struggle to share the objectives of each team. The result is a siloed organization that benefits no one.
This lack of consistency is also explained by changes in consumption habits and user journeys that have been disrupted over the last decade. This is even more true in B2B.
User Behavior Has Changed
In France, a few years ago, sales reps were still in charge of the majority of the sales funnel process.
Marketing departments were content with developing brand awareness and creating demand in consumers. Sales teams handled the rest, up to the purchase of the service or product.
Nowadays, the lines are more blurred. More and more companies are succumbing to the siren call of inbound marketing.
In this case, your content strategy takes precedence. You need to capture the prospect’s attention, push the right lever at the right time, ensure retention, score them… before trying to convert and then retain them.
Cold outreach is less well-received, almost considered intrusive. Why bother contacting a sales rep when all the content is accessible online (this is particularly the case with an inbound sales strategy)?
From now on, it is the potential buyer who is at the heart of the decision-making process.
This is why it is crucial to align sales and marketing.
The Benefits of Sales and Marketing Alignment
Specifically, the benefits of aligning a company’s marketing and sales departments are as follows:
- Easier deal closing, thanks to leads enriched with sufficient information (lead maturity through scoring, decision-making power…)
- Acquisition of data on customer habits and their preferred channels, reported by sales to marketing
- In-depth knowledge of the content consumed by your potential customer
- The ability for a manager to train their sales force in social media engagement and sales techniques to increase performance in social selling
- Pooling of objectives for easier results to achieve
The combination of sales and marketing is commonly called smarketing. It generally aims to focus the strengths of marketers and sales reps on strategic accounts.
In jargon, this is called Account-Based Marketing. What are the solutions for implementing this cohesion within your company?
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How to Create Synergy Between Sales and Marketing?
Integrating Account Based Marketing (ABM) tools into the process requires particular rigor from the director or team leader.
The objective: to end siloed organizations and better distribute knowledge.
Here are the solutions to achieve this:
Communicate Your Objectives
We touched on this earlier. Usually, sales reps and marketers do not share the same vision of the job.
Driven by bonuses based on their KPIs, they work towards different goals.
- The former aim to sell.
- The latter aim to boost click-through rates, traffic, and lead numbers. Sometimes at the expense of quality.
By working together to increase lead conversion, everything becomes simpler for everyone. It is up to management to dedicate the necessary efforts. The SLA is one of the possible solutions to achieve this.
Implement a Service Level Agreement
It’s not easy to formalize agreements between marketing and sales departments.
However, simply drafting a Service Level Agreement (SLA) can formalize all stakeholder commitments.
An SLA can include:
- Objectives to be achieved
- Employees involved
- Means implemented to achieve them
- Penalties for non-compliance
- Bonuses for success
- …
Obviously, for the document to have more impact, it must evolve along with the methodology used by your company.
Each manager must take into account feedback from all stakeholders and adapt the SLA accordingly in real-time.
It will serve as a charter or code of conduct for all joint campaigns between sales and marketing.
For more information on Service Level Agreements, you can consult Hubspot’s dedicated article on the subject.
Don’t Waste Time on the Wrong Channels Anymore
Saving time means saving money.
How much effort is spent on the wrong channels, those where your potential customer is not present?
It is important to keep in mind your company’s main objective: generating revenue.
Therefore, analyzing results is the key to your business’s success. Have you undertaken SEO, SEA, SMA acquisition campaigns?
- Evaluate the number of leads each of them brought you.
- For SMA, find out which social network converts best
- Iterate on the most successful channel
If the sales team declares that leads from Facebook are of poor quality, even if they are much higher in number, try to optimize your targeting criteria.
If targeting remains ineffective, focus on other entry points.
Identify Your IAPs and ICPs Together
Even more important than channels, personas are the pillars of a good ABM strategy.
Take time to identify your Ideal Account Profiles (companies potentially interested in your services) and your resulting Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs).
Here are the criteria to consider for optimizing your lead generation:
- Company-related data: company size, industry, financial capacity, funding stage (Series A, Series B, fundraising…)
- Prospect-related data: their job title, seniority, decision-making power, skills, areas of interest (defined by keywords they use)…
- Data collected from previous campaigns: consider all recent indicators that will allow you to refine the targeting of your campaigns (conversion rate, response rate, click-through rate…)
Establish a Joint Lead Scoring Strategy
Lead scoring consists of assigning points to each action taken by your prospect within your conversion funnel. These actions can include:
- Downloading content on a specific topic (white paper, glossary…)
- Registering for an event (offline, online)
- Subscribing to a newsletter
- Responding to a prospecting email
- Scheduling a phone call or video conference
- Purchasing a product or service…
Defining your KPIs together allows you to determine the best time to transfer a prospect from marketing to sales.
When managed by the marketing department, it is an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). When they are mature enough to become a customer, it is up to the sales department to take over. The lead is then considered an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead).
To avoid missteps when determining the roles of the marketing and sales teams, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is your lead still cold or hot?
- What criteria and actions has your lead met to be considered actionable by sales?
Once you have gathered enough data, enrich the data within your CRM to bring all members of your company to the same level.
💡 Good to know:
click here to learn all the elements to consider for establishing a good lead scoring methodology.
Leverage Events to Sell
In a deeply digitized world, human interaction is a key element to reassure and build credibility for your company.
Whether offline or online, events are excellent prospecting grounds. These can include webinars, conferences, trade shows, or live social media sessions.
There are two ways to capitalize on events:
- Organize your own event: Marketing handles invitations, targeting profiles suited for your company’s growth. Sales can get involved to invite clients or hot leads.
- Monitor events in your industry: Marketers handle the monitoring. In parallel, they use their copywriting skills to craft messages tailored to each type of prospect attending. They schedule one-on-one meetings or block time slots during the event (e.g., at a trade show). Sales reps take over and manage the in-person meetings.
LaGrowthMachine: A Tool to Automatically Combine Sales and Marketing
LaGrowthMachine is your indispensable ally to ensure you send the right leads at the right time.
By combining automation with manual configuration, you can precisely determine which content to send to which prospect, for any stage of your conversion funnel.
Since LGM allows you to work across multiple channels, you can explore various entry points, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, or email.
Once your campaigns are launched, you have access to real-time campaign results. It becomes easy to measure the effectiveness of your different channels and evaluate which entry points to optimize.
Then, all you have to do is adapt your copywriting to turn cold prospects into warm ones… or convert your warm prospects into customers!
What to Remember
Historically, the sales and marketing departments have always been at odds.
It’s not easy to bring coherence and collaboration when the expected results are not based on the same objectives and statistics…
But once their strengths are combined, the result is brilliant. To achieve this, here are the steps to follow:
- Jointly identify your personas
- Share your objectives
- Only work on channels that are worthwhile
- Jointly judge the quality of your leads and the opportune moment to convert them from MQL to SQL
- Implement a Service Level Agreement
- Capitalize on events