Right now, marketing and sales teams are being tasked with doing more with less.Fewer resources, less budget, and little room for waste. Joining forces has its benefits, and failure to do so comes with a cost.
“Failure to align sales and marketing teams is leading to wasted budget and resources as up to 60-70% of B2B content is not being used and close to 75% of marketing leads never convert into a sale.”
Consumer habits have evolved.They want their decision-making process to be simplified and handled on their own time. Now, only 5-17% of your B2B buyer’s journey is spent with the salesperson – the rest is spent elsewhere.
If your right hand is talking to the left, you’ll create better, more effective assets to help customers along their journey. When marketing messages are consistent, the chance of your salespeople closing the deal increases tremendously. You’ll attract more qualified leads and build trust with your customers – leading to better close rates and increased retention.
Not sure where to start? Here are 7 tips to align your sales and marketing efforts to achieve success:
Agree on Your Ideal Customer
Knowing who you want to sell your product or service to is critical.Sales and marketing may have a very different vision of who their ideal customer is, leading to ineffective strategies and internal disconnects. Aligning your personas will help you understand what your customers are looking for and their biggest challenges. If you don’t understand their challenges, you will fail to meet their needs.
Create a Simplified Customer Journey
Taking a 360 view of the customer journey allows your teams to act quickly and decisively to help more leads get through the sales funnel. Look at your current journey holistically.Review it, poke holes in it, and aim to create one stellar brand customer experience both teams can get behind. At the end of the day, you should be able to pinpoint the places where your prospects are interacting with your marketing assets, and what information they’ll already have by the time your salespeople get in touch.
Adopt a “Marketing First” Approach
90% of buyers won’t even take a cold call if they’ve never heard of you. Effective marketing strategies can warm up and nurture leads by identifying potential customers that have a specific problem and educating them that your product or service is the solution. When the lead is better informed and ready to make the decision, the sales team can step in to reinforce the proof points and close the deal.
Collaborate on Effective Marketing Assets
To gain your customers’ trust, it’s crucial to be a united front when it comes to messaging.Marketing messaging should warm up the lead so sales can come in and reinforce the same ideas. When marketing messages are consistent, the chance of closing the deal increases tremendously.
Developing content such as blogs, infographics, video tutorials, white papers, and case studies are highly effective at moving prospects further down the sales funnel. However, it’s important your sales team is able to use the content effectively. Asking your sales team to provide their own ideas to inform content creation, along with regular meetings between the two departments leads to a better understanding of how to effectively use these assets and leads to collective buy-in. See how we accomplished this for Nationwide pet insurance.
Join Forces on Growth and Retention
It’s 6-7 times more expensive to attract new customers than it is to retain them. To increase customer lifetime value (CLV), ensure your marketing team looks beyond sales and also includes a customer relationship marketing program in the overall strategy. Once you gain their business, the marketing team can shift their communication to influencing a customer to stay with your business and the sales team is on deck to hop in at any time.
Consistently Review Customer Feedback
The sales team has the ability to build customer relationships; allowing them to hone in on customer needs, pain points, and motivations. Marketing can collect feedback and conduct research to arm sales with the insights they need to be more effective. And for added effectiveness, marketing can lean on these insights to create new messages that resonate and refine your offering to better meet your customers’ needs.
Measure joint KPI’s
Traditionally, sales and marketing departments are evaluated in different ways. To ensure you’re moving in the same direction and truly supporting each others’ success, create a set of metrics that proves the value of your efforts. For example, how do you define a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)? What is your close rate of warm leads, and how can marketing support the process?
Get together frequently to collaborate on successes and detect weaknesses in your customer acquisition funnel under one common goal.Fostering collaboration leads to increased sales, keeps teams engaged, and helps your business one step ahead of the competition.
We are a brand strategy, content creation and creative agency that works diligently to help our B2B clients achieve success. We’ve helped numerous organizations achieve synergy between the two departments that impact your brand’s bottom line the most. Contact us for help meeting your business goals.
