This rivalry is common in any organization. It’s a common problem, but it can also be solved easily. To end the feud, many companies have turned to market automation. You can too if you understand these five key areas of marketing and sales.
1: Single Customer View
To align marketing and sales, you must first get a clear picture of the customer. Marketers have found this difficult because of the many tools they use that don’t share data. It is necessary to have a complete picture of all sales and marketing interactions between your company and any individual, regardless of channel. This includes all emails received, marketing and sales, as well as every visit to a web page, social click, or any other information in your CRM.
2: Common Definitions
Once you have one customer view, it is time to create a common set of definitions so that you can communicate effectively. These terms are important for both sales and marketing.
- Lead: Define the actions and behaviors that a leader should exhibit. Define the process for putting leads into the CRM and who is responsible.
- Sales-Qualified lead (SQL): Define when a lead can be considered an SQL and what factors determine this. When a lead is marked SQL, what actions should be taken?
- Marketing-Qualified lead (MQL): Define how MQL leads are passed to sales and the engagement timeframe for all MQL leads.
- Contact: Define when and how a contact is created.
- Account: Define when an account was created and what information should be on the account or contact/lead records.
- Opportunity: Describe the stages of a potential opportunity. Define the location of the information to be kept regarding the record.
3: Aligned Goals
To align goals, most companies don’t have them. Only by measuring sales and marketing using the same metric, can you ensure that goals are aligned. You should also measure marketing opportunities if you measure sales. We recommend that you measure success using two metrics: the amount of MQL leads that are generated and the number MQLs which turn into closed/won businesses. This will allow you to monitor the quality and quantity of leads marketing is passing on.
4: Notifications
Marketing’s ineffectiveness is what leads to the belief that it doesn’t matter. This can be solved by giving sales visibility into leads’ and prospects’ interactions with marketing assets. Sales can view every page and email that a customer reads if they already have a single customer view. Consider going one step further. To help sales understand the impact of these interactions, they must be notified whenever a prospect does an indicative action. It doesn’t mean that they should be notified every time someone opens an email. However, you might set up an alert to notify them when a prospect downloads buyer’s guides or accesses pricing information.
5: Support Campaigns
Salespeople often have many tasks. It is important to support them. These campaign ideas can be very simple and will greatly improve their perception of you and your effectiveness.
- Lost Deal campaign: This will help sales keep up to date on any deals that they lose. To maintain rapport with contacts during interim evaluations, the campaign can be automated to send emails between the sales rep and the contact.
- Cold Lead Drip: Many leads that are not passed over despite having high scores aren’t ready to speak to sales. These leads aren’t bad. They just might need to be educated more — time that sales may not have. Help them by giving them a campaign to that they can add cold leads.
- Competitive Drop: Marketing may pass on leads to sales that are using a different technology at the time they were created. These leads can still be valuable, but sales often overlook them in their pursuit of non-vented leads.
- Thought Leader Drip: A simple way to help salespeople is to provide a process for dealing with leads who request to be followed up. While most leads will say no, remember that many of them were drawn to you by something they saw. Give them more of the things they want.