Marketing Insights - The Art and Science of Creating Demand

There is no question that when sales and marketing work well together, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics: Sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower.” – Harvard Business Review. Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing.

If the company has a great quarter – sales gets the praise. If the company doesn’t meet its targets – marketing didn’t create enough demand. I think we have all heard that one before. But, the reality is that when those teams are aligned culturally and economically, we see peak sales funnel performance. So, what can you do to better align your sales and marketing organizations?

1. Get on the same page. Easier said than done, right? The New Year is a perfect time to look realistically at the perceptions across the two functions. A Relationship Map excercise can help you to identify gaps in perception and prioritize areas for improvement, without pointing fingers. Pick the criteria to rank performance on (messaging, brand awareness, lead volume, lead quality, etc.) and then have the marketing and sales teams rate performance individually. The Harvard Business Review also has a checklist approach for facilitating these conversations to positively align the teams. Also, consider using financial incentives for the marketing function that map to sales objectives for increased natural collaboration.
2. Document lead definitions. Often the disconnect in language and semantics can break down the alignment. Jointly define, document, and widely distribute your organization’s universal stages of the marketing and sales funnel. **Hint: A raw form submission is probably not the same as a sales-ready lead. Brian Carroll’s article Bridge Sales & Marketing Gap With Clear Lead Definitions contains some great tips on how to help improve your organization’s lead definitions.
3. The right information at the right time. Sit down with your sales teams and identify which pieces of information are helpful for them to do their job – and also which information is not. Setting real-time web visitor notifications for a “named account” could really help a field rep determine when that account is showing increased interest and when to take action. An telesales rep responsible for cold calling may benefit from an aggregate unknown web visitor report with a domain lookup. This could highlight an indicator of a potentially interested prospect.
4. Empower them to respond effectively. Providing visibility into a user’s activity is definitely an important place to start – this visibility into a prospect buyer’s digital body language and guide the rep on follow-up approach. The next step, however, is to provide the sales rep with tools and templates that they can easily access, personalize, and report on. This enables marketing to have a voice at the table on what goes out the door, while increasing sales efficiency.

Ultimately, sales and marketing are driving towards the same goal – revenue. Involve both functions at the beginning to define objectives, process, key metrics, etc. Identify what sales needs to be more effective as well as what marketing needs to protect the brand – and provide the right metrics to the right folks. Then, look at how automation can help both functions to not only scale – but deliver a powerful 1-2 punch.

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