4 Steps to Aligning Your Marketing and Sales Operations
March 8, 2015 11:00 AM EST
Attend this FREE webinar to:
- Learn why data drives your Inbound Marketing Strategy
- Gain insight into the smarketing alignment keys imperative for effective on-line lead generation while learning how to assess people, tools, strategy and measurement of your sales and marketing operation
- Discover the hidden benefits of sales & marketing alignment
- Explore the essential tools of smarketing automation to keep your pipeline full
Is there a lot riding on the performance of your marketing and sales teams to successfully execute their goals? Of course there is. Without a sales pipeline full of leads, it’s easy for your bottom line to shrink. As a senior living provider, you can’t afford to lose residents to your competitors so what’s the secret?
Alignment! It's extremely important that marketing and sales teams are aligned because nothing can harm a revenue team more than misalignment of goals, strategy, people, processes, and systems. In fact, according to MathMarketing, companies that align their sales and marketing teams lose 36% fewer customers to competitors and grow 5.4 points faster than their less aligned competitors. As a marketing or sales manager, where do you begin to achieve alignment for your inbound marketing and sales program?
4 Essential Areas of Sales and Marketing Alignment
Understanding-We have all heard it before-people are your greatest asset, however they can also be your greatest liability without clear expectations. Ensuring that there is a clear understanding between the marketing and sales team with regards to roles, responsibilities and goals is imperative in order to obtain synergy within the team.
The marketing team requires a different skill set to manage an inbound marketing program that delivers sales qualified leads, and the sales team requires a different skill set to nurture inbound leads that aren’t ready to talk to you yet.
Equally, if not more important, is to understand the process the senior and adult child use today to make their decisions. The likelihood of potential leads walking in off the street ready to talk with sales are slim. In a study sponsored by Google and CEB, they identified that 57% of the traditional sales process has evaporated. This means information that typically was shared by your sales reps is now found by your prospective leads during their own searching and research. This results in a tremendous opportunity for your sales team to help the prospective lead during this new buyer journey.
Roadmap-I bet that your culinary department doesn’t prepare their delicious meals without planning their menu, taking into account special diets and the food pyramid right? The same holds true for your marketing and sales team. Lead generation suffers when marketing and sales aren’t aligned with a mutually agreed upon strategy.
The days of “spray and pray” spontaneous strategy is a waste of time and budget. There is a methodical process that needs to be in place from the time a visitor is attracted to your website, converted from a visitor to a lead, nurtured into a sales qualified lead (SQL), and then become ready to speak with a sales representative. It is at this point that sales is able to build trust and rapport with the SQL by uncovering their needs and wants and determining the appropriate nurturing strategy to take to shorten the sales cycle.
Automation-Seeking avenues to improve productivity and efficiency takes place in all areas of your operations. It only makes sense that incorporating automation into your marketing and sales processes will save time and money. Automation facilitates the strategy.
Integrating your automated marketing system, which marketing uses to generate and nurture leads until they become sales qualified, with your CRM (Customer Relationship Management System) which your sales team uses to manage sales qualified leads until they become customers results in closing the gap on lost leads and shortens sales cycles.
Data-The C-suite relies heavily on data to drive their decisions in all aspects of their operation. With traditional marketing and sales, we could never tie the ROI to our efforts. It was difficult to really justify what contribution to revenue marketing and sales had. With a properly aligned inbound marketing and sales strategy, metrics are available in real time to continually monitor the ROI.
When we think about sales and marketing alignment, and how those two need to operate as one, anything that marketing and sales does should be to increase revenue. Tracking ROI means looking at KPI’s (Key performance indicators) at every stage of the sales funnel on a daily basis. From a top of funnel KPI, such as traffic, to a bottom of funnel KPI, such as conversion ratio of sales qualified leads to customers, data drives the performance of the strategy and its execution.
Final Thoughts
Alignment of your marketing and sales processes doesn’t happen overnight. However, applying the new strategic proven methodology of inbound marketing and inbound sales gives you a solid foundation for ensuring you will have the essential commitment and plan in place to implement new processes, tools and tactics that will result in higher revenues.
Whether you are seeking avenues to improve your existing inbound marketing and sales, or you’re an innovative CEO, COO, CMO or VP of Marketing looking for the new strategic approach to marketing and sales alignment for higher revenues, then join us for this webinar…
